


The End Days: Ylisse Asunder

by DetectiveRoboRyan



Category: Fire Emblem: Kakusei | Fire Emblem: Awakening
Genre: (He doesn't know it right away), (It takes a bit), (These are not the same sets of parents), AU Where Emm's dad doesn't die right away lol, Abuse, Abusive Parents, Childhood Friends, Chrom is Hella Trans, End Days Continuity, F/F, F/M, Hiatus, I SWEAR I'LL GET BACK TO THIS, Manipulation, Mostly Fluff Actually? Except Some Bits, Mostly about Emmeryn, Political Drama, Politics, Pre-Canon, Prequel, Self-Discovery, Slow Burn, Somebody get Emmeryn to a child psychotherapist, Tiny Gays, Worldbuilding, bc he needs to be in the picture for some time at least, bodyguard crush, good parents
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-12-03
Updated: 2017-04-18
Packaged: 2018-08-28 18:34:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 31,568
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8457802
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DetectiveRoboRyan/pseuds/DetectiveRoboRyan
Summary: Fifteen years before Robin and Chrom's story begins, there is little princess Emmeryn and her mother and father and sister and another sibling who won't be born for another few months. In time, she must learn how to play the elaborate equation that is politics and diplomacy. Equations are simple because the numbers aren't people and she doesn't have to pretend to feel anything, so perhaps it's more of a dance-- a side-stepping clandestine waltz of intentions and suggestions, where she learns to wear steel beneath her silk and wield peace as its own type of weapon.Fifteen years before Robin and Chrom, there is also a spirited young knight named Phila who fights so her battle-weary mother won't have to, and who one day stops serving her Exalt solely out of duty. She knows love, but love is hard to teach to one who thinks herself unsuited to it.





	1. The Aftermath

**Author's Note:**

> lol

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Andrej stands with a creak of his bad knee, injured in a fall from his horse early in his service to Exalt Lionel. "Come, little princess," he says to her, offering a leather-gloved hand. "We should get you back to bed, yes? You can talk with your father in the morning."_
> 
> _Emmeryn lowers her head, even if she does take his hand in her tiny one. "I don't want to," she says. "I'm old enough to know the truth from where he says it."_
> 
> She is the queen of Ylisse before she has a chance to be the princess.

_18 Julius, 1399._

Castle Ylisse is cold at night even in the summer and it's cold the night after the events of Fort Beauregard. Emmeryn is nine and a half and she is supposed to be asleep in the nursery but she saw heard the guards crank open the rusting portcullis for a caravan coming up the road— she can hear the shouts of the rioters in the city and see the burning of the buildings, and even though she's not supposed to go outside she knows it smells like ash and blood. But the guards have not opened the portcullis for anything in months, not since last year's harvest came in and a group of rebels raided their stockpiles. And she hears the guards running down the polished-tile halls, and she hears some whisper to one another the Exalt is back, the Exalt is back, and if that doesn't shake her from slumber she doesn't know what will.  
  
She tiptoes past her sister Charlotte, asleep in her bed with an arm around her once-plush stuffed bear, and takes a second to tuck the covers back up to her chin where they'd fallen. Emm is not supposed to be awake but she is anyway, so she peers through the nursery door to make sure nobody is coming and quietly slips out.  
  
The tile is cold under her bare toes but she doesn't care. Everyone is going towards the infirmary so that's where Emm goes, too, hiding behind pillars when she sees somebody rush past and holding the skirt of her too-big nightgown off her ankles. She knows that being disobedient isn't something little princesses should do, but Emm has never cared for blindly following what people tell her to do— the world is too big and there is too much to know for her to care what she should or should not do. Her nurses also say she should spend less time asking questions and more time studying. _No, your highness, we don't know what stars are made of. No, your highness, nobody's written any books on it. No, your highness. No. No. No._  
  
But nobody has seen her, so there is nobody to say _no, your highness, you can't be here, go back to bed._ There are many, many people in the infirmary, all whispering about the Exalt and if it's true the war is over. She gets as close as she dares, peering around the base of a statue of someone nobody even cares about anymore, and she feels a large hand on her shoulder.  
  
She freezes and whips around, pressing herself to the wall of the alcove. But it's just Andrej, crouched and looking at her with concern. He looks weary from the march back to Ylisstol and his armor is smeared with blood and ash, and he's holding a bandaged mangled arm close to his chest.  
  
"Your highness?" he whispers. "What are you doing out of bed, little one?"  
  
"I heard the portcullis open," she whispers back. "Is it true? Is my father back, and is the war over?"  
  
Andrej purses his lips. Andrej is old, old enough to have served Emmeryn's grandmother, but it's not like the Siege has been any better for him than it has for anyone else. He looks like he ages ten years whenever he has to think about Emmeryn's father or about the war— so really, it's more like he loses ten years of age every moment he forgets. "We do not know," he says. "But your father is back. He is wounded. He says he may end the war, but…"  
  
"He should," Emmeryn decides. "I wrote up a peace treaty for him to use, and a diplomatic plan of action and everything. It's in my journal. He and King Akraam are going to give their swords to me so I can keep them safe, and they're going to shake hands and say they're sorry for ruining each others' countries and killing lots and lots of people. Then they're going to have tea and talk about the ways they're going to work together to fix everything. I'll give the swords back when they've proven they can be nice with them."  
  
Andrej chuckles. "Perhaps when your father feels better, you can discuss it with him. I am sure he'd be pleased his heir is taking her job seriously, yes?"  
  
_No, he won't be,_ some quiet part of Emmeryn says. _He'll scowl and say that I should go play with my dolls like little girls are supposed to do, and leave the politics for grown-up men and women. He'll say I'm too naive to think about these things, and that the way the world works is that those who are strong enough to make the hard decisions are the ones in power and peace is an ideal that can never truly be achieved as long as people have brains in their heads and blades in their hands._ And then she knows that if she persists he will raise his hand and she knows what that means, so she'll grip her journal closer to her skinny chest and run back to the nursery where she has stolen several books on law and history from the library and she can pour over them again to see just where they say peace can never be achieved.  
  
She shakes her head, her blonde curls falling in her eyes. She blows them off her face and tugs at her nightgown.  
  
Andrej stands with a creak of his bad knee, injured in a fall from his horse early in his service to Exalt Lionel. "Come, little princess," he says to her, offering a leather-gloved hand. "We should get you back to bed, yes? You can talk with your father in the morning."  
  
Emmeryn lowers her head, even if she does take his hand in her tiny one. "I don't want to," she says. "I'm old enough to know the truth from where he says it."  
  
Andrej doesn't seem to know what to say. He has grandchildren Emmeryn's age that act the exact same way when they don't get what they want— not spoiled, per say, but upset that the world isn't working out the way they think it should because they've been told all their lives they're intelligent and destined for great things, and that's what happens when you tell a child such. His grandchildren are seven, ten, and twelve and they're the ages where they know there is unfairness and suffering in the world and the adults around them try to shield them from it, but they know it's happening and being prevented from doing anything about it is stifling. But they're in Valm, and he hasn't seen them in three years.  
  
"Andrej," Thea calls, voice quiet. She walks over to where he's standing with her armor clanking, once polished to a mirror's sheen and now dented and marred with soot and dried blood. "What's wrong? Knee bothering you?"  
  
"Is fine," Andrej insists. "I've found the princess."  
  
Thea sighs, and takes a knee in front of Emmeryn. Emmeryn likes Thea— Thea is younger and she's her father's other bodyguard, and she brings Emmeryn little maple candies that her husband sends her in the mail. Her family lives a day and a half's ride from Ylisstol, far enough into the countryside and away from the rioting in the city that the refugees from the riots go there to take shelter. Thea is tall and broad and perpetually sunburned, and her silver-blue hair is short but always wind-mussed even though she's not a flier, she's a cleric. But she smiles despite the messiness of the war and she always has something good to say, and even if she and Lionel don't like one another on a personal level, she's still sworn to guard him, and she does her job well.  
  
"The excitement woke you, did it?" Thea asks. Emm releases her tiny fists from where they were clenched in her nightgown and nods.  
  
"I heard the portcullis," she says. "And I heard people down the halls outside the nursery. Charlotte is still asleep." But Charlotte could sleep through an avalanche, so that's no surprise. "What's happened to father?"  
  
"He's hurt, from the battle," Thea tells her, and Emm also likes Thea because Thea is level with her and doesn't try to dress things up because of her age. "He's going to be okay by the morning, but he needs to rest tonight. Were you worried?"  
  
_Not really,_ part of her says. She knows that's probably horrible, but in truth, she isn't. She knows he'll either survive it or he won't, and if he doesn't then that's that much earlier she gets the throne and her chance to end this silly war. It's only been four years since the war began— _how_ has it gotten this bad?  
  
"Yes," she lies. "I'm glad he'll be okay." She thinks there will always be a part of her that says _make him stop with the scowling and the glaring and the hitting, make him suffer, make him burn,_ but she knows she's not strong enough and really, while he's around, what power does she have?  
  
(Thea doesn't believe her. Thea can sniff out untruths like a bloodhound, but she knows that when Emm lies about things like this, it's for good reason. She doesn't know the half of why but she knows that house Grace is in internal turmoil and most of what she wants to do is take their children out of it and into her own home, where she and her husband will raise them right alongside their own twins on three hearty meals a day and plenty of sunshine and parental love, but knows full well that she can't.)  
  
"First thing in the morning, I'll come by and let you know how he's doing, alright?" Thea promises. "But it's late now, and the sooner you go to bed, the sooner you can talk to your father."  
  
Reluctantly, Emmeryn nods. Thea smiles, and it's a kind smile that Emmeryn doesn't often receive from her parents and thus has no idea how to handle, and gently takes Emmeryn's other hand. "I'm sorry for getting up when I wasn't supposed to," Emmeryn mumbles, like it's scripted, because she has learned that that's what she's supposed to do when she does something against her father's wishes.  
  
"That's quite alright, your highness," Thea promises, walking with her and Andrej back towards the nursery. "The noise woke you up, so you went and saw what was going on. There's nothing bad about that."  
  
That makes Emmeryn feel a little bit better. Thea always knows what to say. Emm wishes that it were that easy for her— somehow, anything she tries to say to her parents sounds wrong. Like they're grading what she says for clarity and intent, and if it's wrong they'll look at her like they're wondering how, when all of her tutors say she's so smart, she still manages to think things the wrong way. But they'll never tell her this. Emmeryn knows by the way they look at her and then turn around and tell her to get back to her studies.  
  
She thanks Thea and Andrej when they get to the nursery and Thea gently tucks one of Emmeryn's curls out of her face and tells her goodnight, and Emmeryn nods and wishes her the same. Andrej smiles kindly and wishes her sweet dreams, and holds the door open for her to creep inside, quietly so as not to wake her sister. She sneaks back past Charlotte, still slumbering peacefully in her little bed with all her toys, and crawls back under her covers. She can still see the city burning despite that the curtains are drawn. But she falls asleep drafting up more diplomatic plans, more peace treaties and proposals and works projects to make the people happy again and bring the soldiers home.  
  
She wakes before Charlotte in the morning, as usual. Charlotte still sleeps peacefully, tiny hands half-uncurled and her bear tucked in the crook of her arm. Her soft blue curls are spread out on the pillows and, even with the missing front tooth, she looks like a china doll like the kinds relatives give Emmeryn that are not really playthings because they’re terribly expensive and you only give them to a child if you know the child doesn’t play rough with dolls or if you or the child is very rich and has the money to sink into doll repair. Emmeryn does play with dolls, and when she was younger she played out very elaborate dramas about Princess Magnifica, her favorite of her dolls, who was perpetually sixteen and led a heroic life saving duchesses and exposing political conspiracies that always ended happily because Emmeryn thinks all stories should have a happy-ever-after, even if lots of people died along the way. Now she plays with them sometimes, but everybody keeps saying that she ought to grow up and focus on her studies if she’s to become Exalt someday. She re-enacts famous trials and scenes from history with them now instead of really playing, and she can’t tell, but it vaguely disturbs anyone over the age of fourteen who happens to bear witness. Something about seeing a young child narrate with clear understanding the processes of court justice makes adults— at least adults that have had reasonably normal childhoods— uneasy. Maybe it’s all the execution.  
  
By the time she’s dressed and combed and ready to face the day, Charlotte has rolled out of bed and padded to the closet, still bleary-eyed and dragging her bear. She yawns while Margaret, their sole remaining nursemaid, helps her button up her dress.  
  
“You’re going to sleep straight through breakfast one of these days,” Emmeryn tells her, attempting to run a comb through her curls and not succeeding.  
  
Charlotte looks at her with a half-lidded stare of pure annoyance and contempt, as if asking _‘how dare you speak to me this early,’_ and says, “Fight me.” The fact that she’s four makes it less threatening and more silly. Emmeryn doesn’t know where she learned that, but she doesn’t seem apt to forget it. At least she’s using the phrase properly.  
  
It’s early enough in the morning that breakfast isn’t quite ready yet, so with the extra time, Emmeryn makes her way back down towards the infirmary— she hasn’t forgotten about the previous night, and damn it, she’s going to get answers.  
  
Thea catches her halfway down the hallway. There’s sunlight pouring in through the windows and it makes the burning city feel a lifetime away, but Emmeryn isn’t fooled. She knows if she steps outside she’ll smell ash so thick she’ll choke on it. The city burns at night, but it doesn’t stop burning in the daylight. She wonders if, when she’s Exalt and she’s able to make the riots stop, the air will stop smelling like ash.  
  
“He’s doing much better today,” Thea tells her. “Standing. He and King Akraam were locked in a duel, but he came out on top. I think he’s in his trophy room now.”  
  
“That’s good,” Emmeryn decides. “I couldn’t tell him about my new plans if he didn’t live through the duel. I looked over my books more for a little bit, and they give lots of evidence for peace treaties working out positively for both countries involved. I think I’ll propose a restriction on the weapons we can use in war— siege weaponry, I think, is too destructive to be used within city limits because of the high civilian casualty rates, and we don’t want innocent people caught up in the fights, right?”  
  
“Of course,” Thea nods, and Emmeryn knows she’s agreeing because she actually agrees and not just to humor the little princess. “Too many people that aren’t involved die in wars. It’s a good place to start, lowering that number.”  
  
Emmeryn nods, matter-of-fact. “I think father will agree if I present my points like that,” she decides. “It’s important to have concise, clear points when forming an argument. My law book said so.” If her law book said it, then it must be true. Thea hums acknowledgement once they reach the infirmary.  
  
Emmeryn stops outside the trophy room doors. Thea raises an eyebrow. “Everything alright, your highness?”  
  
“Does he want to see me?” she asks, her voice small. Because she knows he’ll sigh and scowl if she comes in to speak with him when he doesn’t want to see her. He’ll say _father is busy,  princess_ and brush her off so she has no choice but to leave with her tail between her legs. It gets easy to wonder if she’s ever really wanted when that happens enough.  
  
“You won’t know until you ask,” Thea replies. “But just in case, I’ll go ask him first, alright?”  
  
That helps. Emm nods and Thea ducks into the trophy room, the door swinging shut behind her without a sound. A second later she returns and nods, and holds the door open for Emmeryn. Emm, smoothing out her dress anxiously, enters the room.  
  
Her father is standing, looking at one of the display cases. The trophy room always makes her feel a little sick. It’s full of souvenirs from various battles and preserved heads of beasts he’s hunted, and Emmeryn thinks it’s cruel to display all these things that were once living or belonged to somebody living as tributes to her father’s ability to kill. But he didn’t ask her (nobody ever asks her) so she doesn’t give her commentary. She hates the trophy room nonetheless.  
  
 Emmeryn has never seen him with his armor off, because usually he’s at least in the breastplate and pauldrons, but even without them he cuts a large, imposing silhouette. He’s not a fat man and not even that tall or large, but he’s strong and square-shaped from swinging a greatsword around all day. He’s not old, either, even if the way he’s huffing after sitting up says the contrary. Exalt Lionel is perhaps in his late thirties, and on the battlefield he’s the picture of all a warrior-king should be— young but old enough to have experience, a man of action but with enough tactical skill to keep his armies from getting killed most of the time. He has a perpetual furrow in his bushy brow as if he’s trying to work out a particularly difficult puzzle, and even if his mouth is obscured by thick, cobalt-blue whiskers, it’s easy to tell his mouth is always turned down in a scowl. He’s the type to look right at home shouting orders on the battlefield, riding a magnificent white charger into battle with Falchion in one hand and a House Grace shield in the other, cape billowing in the wind and armor shining like mirrors as he charges towards his enemies.  
  
Emmeryn swallows. But she steps forwards anyway, determined not to be afraid this time. Maybe that’s why he always looks like she won’t ever measure up to his standards— maybe she’s too cowardly for his tastes and he’s always going on about how he hates cowards. Well, she can change that, can’t she?  
  
“Good morning, father,” she says. “I heard you were injured yesterday.”  
  
He looks up. I’m not afraid, Emmeryn tells herself, even if she absolutely is. But he just grunts. “Indeed. That scoundrel Akraam got in a few hits.”  
  
“I’m glad you’re alright,” she says. “I drafted a new peace treaty. I think this one is better than the last one I sent you, and I thought maybe you’d lost those last few because you haven’t mentioned them.”  
  
And there’s the look. It flashes across his eyes— disappointment, Emmeryn thinks, because she’s not the obedient daughter he wants her to be. But she can’t be obedient, she just can’t, no matter how hard she tries because no matter how hard she tries it isn’t ever good enough.  
  
“Ah,” he says. “Thank you. I’ll be sure to read them.” But he won’t and she knows it, and she feels her ears burn with shame for even bringing it up.  
  
“It’s about, um, weapons policies, for future wars,” she says. “I talked to Andrej l— recently, and he said you may have ended the war? So during peace is the best time to pass new policies.”  
  
Lionel hums. “The war has indeed ended,” he admits. “Ylisse has triumphed. But the task we set out to complete has not been accomplished. The tainted nation must be crushed, and those willing must be assimilated into Ylisse, if only to save their souls.”  
  
“Why do we have to crush Plegia?” Emmeryn asks, frowning. “Haven’t we won already? Can’t we just agree to a ceasefire and leave one another alone to rebuild?”  
  
“Total victory,” Lionel says, and Emmeryn almost takes half a step back at his tone before she remembers that she’s not going to be afraid this time (even though she absolutely is). “Total victory is the way it must be. Since we could not quash the Grimleal at the source, we had to stamp out all the heathens in that blasted nation. This is a war of faith, my child, and faith takes total victory.”  
  
“Why?” Emmeryn continues to ask. “Why do we have to keep killing people? Why do we have to drag the war on for longer than it’s needed?”  
  
“Because some things, only war can say,” Lionel tells her, looking her square in the eye, and Emmeryn feels something in her gut twist. She has never wanted more to run and hide in her storybooks.  
  
Emm swallows. _This was a mistake,_ she thinks. She shouldn’t have talked to her father in the first place. She should’ve known it was only going to lead to this. She tells herself again don’t be afraid, father hates cowards, but her façade of fearlessness is very rapidly fading and she knows he can tell.  
  
“When I’m Exalt,” she says, trying not to let her voice sound small, “I’m going to do things in a different way. I think everybody would be a lot happier if we’d protect the good in everyone instead of focusing on the bad.” Because she may be nine but nine is absolutely old enough to have a sense of justice and morality, and she thinks that while people are fundamentally good, it’s important to take the bad into account because it’s more prevalent and influential in some than in others. Emm tries, but she figures she has some bad in her— that’s probably why her father doesn’t listen to her and why her mother keeps saying she needs to try harder.  
  
Her father chuckles without humor or affection. “I do not doubt that, my girl,” he says. “But you do have much to learn before you’re Exalt. Perhaps by the time you’re of age, you’ll have learned the truths of war and the nature of men.”  
  
She’ll be of age for succession when she’s fifteen, and to Emm, that feels like a lifetime away. But she nods. “Will we bring the soldiers home before then?” she asks. “And free the prisoners? I’m sure they miss their king, don’t they?”  
  
He seems surprised that she asked that. “That is not our concern,” he says. “They are foreign soldiers cowardly enough to surrender to us. What they think or want is inconsequential.”  
  
“But they’re still people, father,” she says.  
  
“Emmeryn, one day you will learn,” he says, turning to her, “That although we are all men, some men in this world are better than others by hierarchy of law.”  
  
“That isn’t fair,” Emm protests, balling up her little fists, her fear forgotten in favor of a determination to say what she knows to be right.  
  
“ _Life_ isn’t fair,” Lionel retorts. “And child, the sooner you stop living in this storybook world of your own creation and join reality as I’ve told you to do _countless_ times, the sooner you can do away with these useless peace treaties and silly attempts at diplomacy, the sooner you’ll be an effective Exalt. Have I made myself clear?”  
  
It’s so unfair, Emm’s ears burn. Part of her wants to argue her cause until she’s blue in the face, even if it means what she knows it’ll mean, and part of her wants to slink off with her tail between her legs, which is always the safer option even if it’s cowardly and her father hates cowards. But he doesn’t hit her because she’s cowardly, he does it because she isn’t being obedient and thinking the way he wants her to think— she’ll never be the perfect little princess without a brain of her own that’s only ever there the twice a year he feels like spending time around his children and otherwise doesn’t exist. To him, the fact that she dares to exist in his presence on shared terms instead of solely his is a radical act of defiance.  
  
But as much as she wants to defy, she lowers her head and nods. “Yes, father,” she says. She feels tears sting in her eyes and she forces them back. She tries to say politely that she has somewhere else to be, like that she promised Charlotte they’d read together or something, but her throat closes up before she can even try.  
  
Thea knocks on the door to the trophy room, then opens it. “Your Grace, your Highness,” she says. “Forgive the intrusion, but Queen-Consort Florence wishes to see Emmeryn, if it pleases.”  
  
“Thank you, Thea,” Lionel nods. “Give Florence my regards, Emmeryn.”  
  
“Yes, father,” Emm croaks. She turns on a heel and half-runs out of the room, keeping her head down so Thea won’t ask. (Thea won’t ask because it’s her job not to ask, but she’ll guess and add another mental tally to the reasons she has to kidnap the royal children and raise them herself.)  
  
Thea walks with her to one of the painting rooms. It’s her mother’s favorite place to go when she doesn’t need to make her appearance by Exalt Lionel’s side, and Emmeryn has come to associate the smell of paint and turpentine with her mother. It always makes her a little on-edge, just because she’s never quite certain what to say to her mother.  
  
Florence turns when Thea opens the door. Thea, respectfully, bows her head to the Queen-Consort when she lets Emm in.  
  
“Emmeryn, my dear,” Florence says. She has a weak voice— watery, like a little warbling songbird. “It’s so good to see you. Did you sleep well?” She rests a hand on her bulging stomach, holding a new little brother or sister. Charlotte hopes it’s a brother because _there’s too many girls around here_ , she says. Emmeryn doesn’t care one way or another— either way her parents won’t care much about it and she’ll be the one who really takes care of it and lets it know that yes, it does have an actual family.  
  
(There was a time once, when Emmeryn was very young, that her parents truly loved her and loved one another, but Emm was five when the war started and everything changed from there. Emm got familiar with being by herself once that happened, when her father spent all his time on war strategies and her mother retreated and withdrew to the point Emm can never find her when she wants to. Emm knows it’s bad to hold it against her parents, because they’re very busy, except that’s exactly what she’s doing and she’s not even bothering to tell herself they’re only doing it for her. She’ll take the secret to her grave, but they messed up and they messed her up and she knows it.)  
  
“Yes,” Emmeryn lies. “Good morning, mother.”  
  
Florence hums. “Have you been to see your father? Thea tells me you were worried.”  
  
“He’s doing better,” Emmeryn says. “He’s acting the same to me, anyway. I tried to tell him about my peace treaties and that went about as well as you’d expect.”  
  
“He doesn’t appreciate you,” Florence says, setting a gentle hand on Emmeryn’s shoulder. Emm wants to shrug it off because it makes her skin prickle, but doesn’t. “Did he talk about the nature of men and all that?”  
  
Emm nods. “He said it was childish and silly to want peace,” she says. “I guess it is. I don’t think I’ll show him my treaties anymore.”  
  
Florence frowns. “Don’t they make you happy, Emmeryn?”  
  
_Don’t talk about this like it’s an issue of me being happy, like you care about that,_ Emmeryn thinks. Instead she shrugs. “It doesn’t matter.”  
  
Her mother hums. She looks at Emm with an unreadable expression, like she’s thinking about everything she’s failed at in being a mother. Maybe if you weren’t such a coward, you could make him stop, Emmeryn thinks spitefully. But she doesn’t say it. Her mother is a coward, and that’s why she can’t.  
  
“Emmeryn,” Florence says. “Do you know about the war?”  
  
“I know it shouldn’t be happening,” Emm says. “Father says it’s about faith and total victory, and that some people are better than others because of law or something. He says my peace treaties won’t help end the war.”  
  
Florence hums acknowledgement, staring out the window at the castle grounds. The apple orchard is outside the big, thin windows of her studio, and it’s still there even if the harvest was poor this year. The castle still has stockpiles of food, pickled and preserved and cured, in the storehouses and if Emmeryn thinks she can get away with it, she’ll sometimes fill a satchel with all it’ll hold with food and leave it on the steps of the cathedral in town. She can probably do it tonight, she reasons. She’ll take some blankets because the weather’s getting colder, and she’ll fill the satchel extra-extra full.  
  
“Emmeryn, you are the heir,” Florence says, snapping her out of her thoughts. “So it falls to you to keep your father from starving this country into ruin. It falls to you to lead the people in their time of need.”  
  
“But,” Emm protests, her voice small. “I don’t know how.”  
  
“You will learn,” Florence says, and it’s not to be reassuring but to tell her that she’d better learn, or else. “You have your father’s determination, and in you, this is a good thing. You can use it for good where your father uses it for ill.”  
  
Emm isn’t sure about this, but what her mind jumps to is that her father needs to die before things get any worse. By the steely stare in her mother’s eyes, she knows this to be true.  
  
She breathes. “I understand,” she says.  
  
“Good,” Florence says. “Good.”  
  
Is that all you wanted from me? Emm wants to ask. A guarantee that I’ll do what you say? But she doesn’t say that, and instead leaves her mother to her paintings.  
  
“Ready for breakfast, your highness?” Thea asks.  
  
“I’m not hungry,” Emm shrugs. “You go ahead. I’m going to the library.” Because one cannot commit regicide without preparation. So Thea bows and leaves, and Emmeryn makes her way to the library.  
  
As it turns out, there aren’t many instruction manuals on how to kill a king, which figures, but Emmeryn manages to draft up a plan anyway. She has to do it before he leaves again, and it goes without saying that there should be no witnesses. As the princess, it’s not like anybody is suspecting her, which helps, but although poison seems to be the traditional way to do it, that’s easy to trace back to her, and where is she going to get poison, anyway? She’d consider pushing him off the highest tower if she had any way of convincing him to talk with her up there, and even though burning him to a crisp with her magic was always an option, it was ultimately impractical and it’d lead too easily back to her, since she didn’t quite know how to control it. So clearly, stabbing was the best option— she’s never seen a real fight in her short life, but she knows which end of a knife to hold, and she’s quick and clever enough to know something about what to do. If she jumped, she could reach his neck, and if she attacked from behind, he wouldn’t see it coming.  
  
She doesn’t know how long he’s going to stay, but it’s for at least the next week— tonight won’t work, she knows, because he’s going to be in meetings tonight and she can’t be seen out after her bedtime or she’ll be in trouble.  
  
But she has a plan, and that’s enough. She’ll scope out her options tomorrow— but tonight, she has other plans.  
  
By now it’s easy enough for her to get down to the storage spaces with her bag without too much trouble. Tonight she steals a dagger from the armory as well, just in case, and tucks it into her belt. She’s on her way out with a bag full to bursting with preserved food when most of everyone else is at dinner, and when somebody notices.  
  
“Emm?” they say, and she takes a moment to thank the gods she doesn’t believe in that it’s Charlotte and not her father, or even Andrej or Thea. Emmeryn breathes, and turns.  
  
Charlotte frowns. “Emm, what’s all that?” she asks. “You goin’ somewhere?”  
  
“Out,” Emm says, purposefully vague. “It’s a secret. You can’t tell anybody I’m going outside, alright? I’ll get in trouble.”  
  
“How come you’re goin’ outside, Emm?” Charlotte persists. “We’re not allowed ‘cause the air’s bad, right? How come you’re goin’ anyway?”  
  
“I’m giving food to people in town,” Emm says. “And I’ll be right back. Don’t tell anybody. Cross your heart.”  
  
“Cross it,” Charlotte repeats, drawing a cross over her heart. “Can I come, too? I wanna see the city!”  
  
“No, you can’t,” Emm says. “It’s too dangerous and I can’t have you slowing me down.”  
  
Charlotte frowns. “Pretty please?” she asks. “I wanna go!”  
  
“Quiet down!” Emm hisses. “You’re gonna get me in trouble if you keep yelling!”  
  
“But I wanna go!” Charlotte whines. “Emmy, pretty, pretty please?”  
  
Her whining is loud enough that Emmeryn is sure someone’s noticed. Her ears prick up when she hears footsteps down another hall— so she does the only thing she can think of doing, and runs away, hearing Charlotte toddle after her and whine, probably at how unfair it is that Emm gets to sneak out and she doesn’t, because Charlotte is four and the concept of sneaking out is foreign to her.  
  
But Emm bolts towards one of the side staircases out to the garden and for now, she hasn’t been caught, and that’s enough.  
  
There are times the city stops burning, sometimes— perhaps if it’s rained so much the fires cannot breathe and it’s too damp to set fire to anything, or there are times the fires run out of fuel and the people are just too tired to set them again. But the streets run with blood and the air still smells of ash, and Emmeryn holds a cloth over her mouth and nose when she climbs through a hole in the crumbling outside wall half-patched with wood. It’s hard to breathe but she runs anyway, because the people need help and even if it’s not allowed, she’s going to give it.  
  
She’s lucky the cathedral isn’t far from the castle itself. It’s all white stone marred with smoke and ash, and once-intricate stained glass windows that have been smashed in and are now covered with canvas sheets and wooden boards. It’s one of the few big buildings still standing at its full height amidst the rioting, standing right there with town hall and the clock tower. She’s been here before the war began, but she can’t really remember much. She must’ve been very small.  
  
Perhaps the air wasn’t full of ash then. The smell in the city is strong— oil and blood mixed with smoke, running in rivers through the streets as freely as the shouts and cries for justice to an authority with its eyes and ears shut. _Why must we fight this long,_ they say, hoisting pitchforks and stones and signs over their heads, crowding the castle gates. _Why bleed this country dry? Why stand on the backs of our siblings, our children, our parents, our lovers, our friends to further a campaign that knows no end? Why fight a war that bleaches the country of its pride? Why justify this?_  
  
_No more,_ Emmeryn promises them, when she stops to watch a tireless group demanding audience of the exhausted guards. _When I’m Exalt, you won’t have to protest just so you can eat tonight. I’ll make it right, I promise._  
  
She’s putting the bag, bursting at the seams, on the steps right outside the door when the other one opens. She freezes— for a moment she thinks it’ll be her father and she almost flinches in anticipation, but then she remembers that it won’t be because he’s in a meeting and what would he be doing in the city cathedral anyway, because it’s not like he cares about the people.  
  
It’s a boy, maybe thirteen years old or so, with a basket of dusty tablecloths. He picks one up and shakes out all the grime and crumbs, and he hasn’t noticed Emm. He’s tall and dark-haired and somehow stern-looking, like he’s bitten into the rind of a lemon but that’s just the way his face is— like he made a sour face for so long when he was younger that his face really did stick that way, which is what Margaret tells Emmeryn every time she scowls.  
  
He still hasn’t noticed. Emm thinks she can, perhaps, back away slowly… slowly… and she’s almost succeeded when he notices the motion. She freezes.  
  
He stares for a solid twenty seconds and every muscle in Emm’s being is telling her to bolt before he hits her or scolds her for being outside the castle walls, but something else tells her that’s not going to happen because he doesn’t even know you, and he doesn’t know that you’re not supposed to be outside the castle. But she fears anyway, because that’s what happens when you hit your kids.  
  
“I don’t recognize you,” he says, immediately on-guard. “Where did you come from? Are you a refugee?”  
  
Emmeryn, silently, shakes her head. She pulls her coat further around her shoulders and prays the shadow of her hood covers the brand on her forehead. It’s then the boy notices the bag of food, and he frowns, as if he’s working out a particularly difficult math problem. Then it clicks.  
  
“You’re the one who’s been bringing food by?” he asks. Emmeryn lowers her head and nods.  
  
“Don’t tell anybody,” she whispers. She braces herself for the scolding that doesn’t come.  
  
“I won’t,” he says. “I… suppose. If that’s what you want. Thank you— the priests appreciate your donations, no matter how small they may be.”  
  
Emm wasn’t expecting that. Carefully, she looks up. He’s still holding the basket of tablecloths, still looking sour, but not because of anything she did because apparently that’s just the way his face looks. Or is he smiling? She honestly can’t tell.  
  
“I’ll bring more when I can,” she says. “People may get suspicious if too much goes missing from the castle stores.”  
  
He blinks in alarm. “You’re taking these from the castle?”  
  
“Of course? From where else would I take them?” Emmeryn shrugs. “There’s plenty there for everyone and I can get in and out easily. I only wish I could carry more.”  
  
“Wow,” he says, as if it’s some incredible feat to get in and out of the castle with the busted walls and bare-bones security. “And you don’t get caught?”  
  
At that, Emmeryn allows herself to beam a little with pride. “Not once,” she says.  
  
“That’s incredible,” the boy says. “And a great help. We’ve fed many hungry mouths with the food you’ve delivered us.”  
  
“With luck, there will come a day when I don’t have to deliver you food so the people inside won’t starve,” Emm shrugs. “If there’s anything I have to say about it.”  
  
“Might I at least know your name, miss?” the boy asks. “I’ll keep it a secret, if you want me to. But I’d like to know it.”  
  
Emm hesitates. “My friends call me Emm,” she says. “And you?”  
  
“Frederick,” he says. “Had I friends, I suppose they’d call me… Frederick.”  
  
“Frederick,” Emm repeats. And she grins— this, she’s sure, is what friendship is even if she doesn’t really have any friends herself. “I’ll remember that! I have to go now— but I’ll be sure to bring more food soon, so you can tell the priests, alright? Tell them that,—” she hesitates. “Tell them things are going to change soon, and they can count on that!”  
  
“I will,” Frederick promises. “Goodbye, then.”  
  
And Emmeryn tugs her hood further over her head and sprints back towards the castle, heart and spirits significantly lighter. Not only does she now know she’s helping when bringing food, she made her first friend on her own! A productive outing, if she says so herself.  
  
She sneaks back into the castle without a hitch. She’s almost managed to sneak back to her room unspotted when she hears heavy footsteps— her father’s, without a doubt. Fear clenching a cold fist over her good mood, she ducks into her room and stuffs her coat back into the wardrobe. She looks in her mirror and prays her cheeks aren’t too flushed, and tries to rub warmth into them so she can lie and say she has a fever.  
  
He’s saying something. Emm presses her ear to the keyhole of the door and listens.  
  
“… Don’t care about that,” he’s growling to whoever it is he’s talking to. “That girl needs to learn _obedience_ , and she never will if you let her galavant about the castle writing her peace treaties!”  
  
“She’s just a girl, Lionel,” her mother replies. “She’s still so naïve about the workings of things. She can’t be causing harm.”  
  
“This is _my_ domain, Florence,” Lionel sighs. “I am the one who decides what she learns, what she’s raised to think. And if she’s learning to think that— that _peace treaties_ and _friendship_ are the way to run a country, then I have failed as a father.”  
  
“Emmeryn seems to have mostly taught _herself_ what is right,” Florence replies. “But what harm is she doing, truly?”  
  
“She’s broken into the food stocks!” Lionel says, aghast, as if he can’t believe his nine-year-old daughter had the brains to steal food from the storerooms. “And for what? We feed her well! Is it not enough? Is this— is this rebellion, or perhaps acting out? And what in the world for, if it is?”  
  
“I cannot pretend to understand the way her mind works,” Florence says patiently. “But you needn’t frighten her.”  
  
“Why am I talking to _you_ , of all people?” Lionel sighs, though he’s mostly run out of steam. “Of course _you_ wouldn’t understand my fears. She got this blasted curiosity from you.”  
  
Perhaps that should be a point of pride to Emmeryn— he says _curiosity_ like it’s a bad thing, and Emm is convinced by now that she might as well do the opposite of what he wants because it’s not like she could ever make him proud, anyway, seeing as how everything she does is the opposite of what he wants. She wants to think that maybe there are some things she hasn’t tried yet, though— maybe it’s the way she carries herself, or something she doesn’t know. And she could always try to be obedient, like he wants, even if she goes crazy. If it’s going crazy or getting hit, which does she want to deal with?  
  
“I’ll talk to her in the morning,” Lionel sighs, finally. “ _Talk_. There is quite a bit of this politics and succession business we’ve yet to clear up.”  
  
“Goodnight, Lionel,” Florence says, and even though it’s a passive statement it sounds like she’s daring him to lay a hand on her daughter again. Emm doesn’t feel reassured— it doesn’t feel like she’s their daughter, and feels more like she’s a bargaining chip or keystone in a crumbling relationship, and it falls to her to hold the family together. Somehow, that doesn’t seem fair— she’s only nine and a half, and this is what she’s supposed to do? Are they going to make her Exalt when she’s nine and a half, too? What else does she need to do? If she’s going to have this much responsibility tacked on this early, perhaps it’s expected that she crumbles by twenty-five.  
  
Either way, it’s decided— Lionel Grace has to die, for the good of the Grace family and for the sake of the Ylissean people. And Emmeryn has to be the one to kill him.


	2. What Must Be

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Emmeryn’s pen is making an ink splotch on her paper. She doesn’t want to think about conscripting— who is there to conscript? Children no older than she is? People that have barely lifted a sword in their life, or can’t? All the healthy young people have already been conscripted, half-trained, and sent off to die. Does he intend to fight with an army of citizens with no training, no equipment, and no love for their country? He may as well be throwing the Plegians slabs of meat to spear. She feels sick to her stomach. Her hands shake, and she sets her pen down so she doesn't ruin her notebook._
> 
> Is doing what's right worth it?

It’s been three months since Fort Beauregard and Exalt Lionel still lives. Emmeryn has been keeping the knife on her person at all times and waited, watched carefully for an opportunity to strike, and has not found one. Her mother is growing tense— Emmeryn told her she’d kill the Exalt before the new year began, and that deadline is fast approaching.  
  
“Time is running out, Emmeryn,” her mother tells her, with urgency. “Mine as well as his. You aren’t afraid, are you?”  
  
She is. “No,” Emmeryn promises. “I haven’t had a chance to. He’s always— always in a meeting, or he’s somewhere I can’t be. The t-timing has to be right.” She doesn’t mean to stutter. She ducks her head and clutches the strap of her book bag when she does. _Don’t be afraid,_ she scolds herself. _Mother doesn’t hit._ But mother demands little other than perfection from Emmeryn— her eldest, her heir. She looks at Emm coldly and Emm almost wishes mother _would_ hit her. Going around with a bruise on her cheek was embarrassing but at least there was something to show for how much it stung.  
  
“Get it done,” Florence says. “Don’t be afraid. You’re going to be Exalt— you have no room to be soft.”  
  
“I won’t be,” Emm promises, again. “I’ll get it done, mother.”  
  
“See that you do,” Florence says. “You do not have forever. If this country is to survive, Exalt Lionel has to die and you must assume the crown.”  
  
Emmeryn swallows. “What happens then?” she asks. “They won’t let me run the country until I’m of age, a-and I don’t know how. I can’t do it on my own.”  
  
Florence gives her a long, even stare. “Do it anyway,” she says. Then she turns and leaves, leaving Emm, hands trembling, the dagger in her bag weighing more on her mind than it does on her shoulder.  
  
Emmeryn avoids her mother after that. The dagger stays in her bag, underneath her notebook full of outlines for works projects and infrastructure improvements, a bottle of ink, and the green pen that Charlotte gave her for her birthday last year. She tells people, when they ask her where she’s off to with all that stuff, that she’s going to the library to work on her proposals, and they’ll chuckle and say how proud her father must be of her, taking her job so seriously, wanting to be a good Exalt like him. Emm lets them think that. People can think whatever they want to think, and in the end, nobody will know it’s her that killed him.  
  
With Plegia’s withdrawal at the death of their king, the political scene in Ylisse is unsettling but quiet— the military is in shambles and the economy not much better. Most civilians have fled Ylisstol to escape the protesting and the rioting, and the angry people that are so bitter and so tired of their friends and loved ones dying for a country that does not care about them, but they still protest, still throw stones at the castle walls, still burn their pictures of Exalt Lionel. _No crown, no war, no more,_ they chant. _No more. We are weary, we are hungry. Why did it have to get this bad? Why did you think bleeding us dry was worth it? Why have you broken your promise of protection to us?_  
  
Lionel thinks Emmeryn doesn’t know about it— he thinks that she’s been sneaking into the stores as an act of rebellion, or something. Even if he does confront her about it, he’s not going to believe the real reason. He’s so focused on his crusade that he can’t fathom helping the people affected by it at home. She’ll tell him if he asks because keeping quiet is always worse, because keeping quiet is cowardly and father hates cowards. Emmeryn isn’t a coward. She tells herself this despite the fact that she knows she’s scared of him, scared of mother, scared of people bigger and stronger than her when they raise their voice or gesture towards her. It makes her clench her fists and makes her knees shake, shoulders hunching inwards like she wants to be a smaller target, wanting to run but knowing only cowards run. Father hates cowards. She will not be a coward. She will not.  
  
Her father summons her to come sit in on one of the strategy meetings. She’s in the seat to his right, the chair as close to the table as it can get, stacked with three thick atlases so she can see the war table properly and take notes. She has her notebook and the pen that Lissa gave her, and her bag at her side. There’s Andrej and Thea, guarding her father’s back at all times like always, and there’s his surviving commanders and generals, his spymaster, his treasurer, and naturally, his official tactician. Emmeryn has always felt out of place when she’s with her father, but this makes her stomach tie itself into knots before anybody has even glanced her way. She could fake an illness (it wouldn’t be hard) and leave, but only cowards bail out and her father has specifically requested her presence at this meeting, and he’d be angry if she left because she was too scared of what might happen to toughen up and deal with it.  
  
He’s already told her she’s not to speak here— just to listen, and to see how these things go. Perhaps she’ll be permitted to speak at meetings in the future, but not yet. _It isn’t a place for little girls with big ideas,_ he’s said. _Save your projects and proposals for when you’re of age, when you’ve thought them through._ And she’d said _yes, father,_ because saying anything else tended to hurt and it wouldn’t do to have anyone asking questions about the mark on her cheek. She won’t speak. She’ll make herself stay quiet. She’ll take notes instead. She won’t even ask any questions, no matter how much she wants to. So she sits up straight in the chair at her father’s right and opens her notebook to a fresh page.  
  
The meeting begins when Arno, the tactician, clears his throat and starts setting little wax figures onto the map. She’s met Arno— he’s an old friend of her father’s, and he’d just finished university when her father was crowned. He taught Emmeryn to play chess when she was eight, but she hasn’t yet managed to beat him, and she’s met his children. They’re twin boys, four years older than Emmeryn, but she’d met them quite a long time ago and hasn’t seen them in ages. “Sire,” Arno says, respectfully nodding to the Exalt. “Plegia has delivered their official surrender. I expect they’re still reeling from the loss at Fort Beauregard.”  
  
“As it should be,” Lionel nods. “And the fort?”  
  
“The fourteenth division is holding it,” Arno says, leafing through reports. “And Commander Wyrmsbane has sent the names of the casualties. Four hundred and thirty-seven killed, and an additional sixty-one fell to injury or sickness. Eleven were killed when the east wing of the fort fell. Eight suicides since last fortnight.”  
  
“See that the families are notified and affects are shipped back,” Lionel says. “Will Wyrmsbane remain?”  
  
“She will, sire,” Arno nods. “She’s helping with the defenses. Lieutenant-Commander Estknell is here in her place.” He nods to another soldier, with brown hair and a thin, grayish face like he’s rubbed ashes into his cheeks and not all of it came out. Lieutenant-Commander Estknell stands, salutes to Lionel, and sits back down.  
  
Lionel hums, a hand on his hair-covered chin. “And the western front?”  
  
“It stands firm, sire,” Arno says, reading from another report. “Our soldiers have it manned with what remains of our forces. We’re spread quite thin, but resistance from Plegia has been little to none. I suspect equal, if not greater, losses to their side.”  
  
Lionel nods, as if this is good news. He’s not smiling because he never smiles, but he’s not doing his displeased scowl either. “See that our terms are written,” he says to Arno. “I will go in person to deliver them. We’ll march on Dahiri.”  
  
Arno purses his lips. “As you say, s—“  
  
“It can’t be done,” Spymaster Heron interrupts, standing and planting her hands firm on the smooth, polished wood of the war table. “My agents in Plegia have reported that although the military and the citizens are in shambles, the Grimleal cult has a strong force of devoted enchanters and magisters guarding the capitol fortress.”  
  
“And what are zealot heathens compared to the might of Ylisse?” Lionel retorts. “We will crush them, as we crush any others. I will not stand for obstacles in Ylisse’s path to greatness, _least_ of all Grimleal.”  
  
“We haven’t the manpower,” Heron insists. “Their force numbers in the _hundreds_. Small compared to an army, yes, but magisters are a tricky lot, sire. They will use every spell at their disposal to get an edge over us.”  
  
“It’s true that the Grimleal are a small but powerful force,” Arno admits. “Perhaps we ought to conscript, build up our military before we march? And I certainly believe it’d be best for you to stay here, sire.”  
  
Now Lionel scowls. “They are but another wall that we must break through,” he says, planting a fist on the table. “Call the tenth division for the march.”  
  
“The tenth division is five men with a total of eight eyes and fifteen limbs between them,” Heron retorts. “All due respect, sire, but they wouldn’t last an hour against a hundred trained magisters.”  
  
“Then we conscript,” Lionel says. “We’ll push the march back to the spring and go with a new crop of soldiers.”  
  
Heron scowls and sits down, and Arno shuffles more papers and adjusts his half-moon glasses. “I can’t promise there will be enough by spring even then,” he admits. “But I’ll give the order, sire.”  
  
Emmeryn’s pen is making an ink splotch on her paper. She doesn’t want to _think_ about conscripting— who is there to conscript? Children no older than she is? People that have barely lifted a sword in their life, or can’t? All the healthy young people have already been conscripted, half-trained, and sent off to die. Does he intend to fight with an army of citizens with no training, no equipment, and no love for their country? He may as well be throwing the Plegians slabs of meat to spear. She feels sick to her stomach. Her hands shake, and she sets her pen down so she doesn't ruin her notebook.  
  
Lionel scowls at the map. “Perhaps we needn’t bother,” he says. “We still have siege weaponry, do we not? Trebuchets and the like?”  
  
“Of course we do,” Arno says.  
  
“Then gather them,” Lionel says. “Level the city. When we conquer Plegia, we’ll build it from the ground up. The capitol of Plegia is naught but a hive of scum and heresy. Best to wipe it off the map entirely than to bother converting it to a city of Ylisse.”  
  
That makes Emmeryn’s stomach churn. “You can’t,” she protests before she can say anything. All eyes turn to her and she regrets it, especially the way she sees her father’s hand twitch out of the corner of her eye. But it’s too late now.  
  
“What about the people living in the city, father?” she continues. She makes herself look her father in the eye despite how much everything in her tells her she should be looking down, saying it was only a moment’s madness, that she feels ill and needs to leave. But that would be cowardly, and father hates cowards. (Then again, she thinks, if this is what bravery feels like, she’d rather be craven for the rest of her life.) “You can’t mean that— that you’ll just _kill_ them all. They’re innocent!”  
  
“Then the sensible ones will run,” her father replies coldly. “Such is the reality of war.”  
  
“It’s cruel,” Emmeryn protests. “What do we even _gain_ from smashing a city full of civilians? Nothing but more people with a vendetta against Ylisse— against _you,_ father— and more demands for your head on a pike.”  
  
He stares at her with a calm fury— practiced, tempered by years of war. He was content as a general when his mother and brother were Exalts, when he could rely on orders and spend his days training, beating out his aggression on training dummies. He was probably much happier then. But suddenly it was inappropriate to continue when he became the Exalt, so Plegia, the nearest target, got his ire. Emmeryn supposes she’ll never know what the impetus was for his initial invasion because her father is a very private person and shares his thoughts with nobody, even his closest friends. But she doesn’t even care about that— suddenly she feels very small, and suddenly she thinks _make him burn, make him die, make him fear you like you fear him, make him burn before he can hurt you again._ She feels her clenched fists heat up, smoke rising from between her fingers, but she makes the fire stop. The nurses will sigh at that she’s burned her hands again, and tell her that she ought to learn control. She feels the pain of playing with fire but her hands shake too badly for her to open them.  
  
She makes herself breathe. He hasn’t spoken yet. “There’s no gain in killing innocents, father,” she says. “All it does is feed the survivors’ anger. I’ve seen the riots in the city. They’ve lost all respect for this country and its leadership, and it’s because you keep sending their friends and loved ones off to die for some cause that was lost a long time ago. What is it now but needless? It’s hurting people and it’s cruel, and it’s wrong.”  
  
And that’s all she can say on the matter. She feels her throat close up when her father shifts, sitting up, and all she can think of is running before he can catch her, but then he’ll be even angrier when he catches up because running is cowardly and father hates cowards. She clenches her fists and they burn. She can smell them burning. It hurts but she won’t cry. Crying is cowardly.  
  
“Those are my orders,” he says to the council. “Make it happen, Arno. See to it the weaponry is ready. That is final.”  
  
Arno swallows. “As you say, sire,” he says, marking it down on his notes. Heron is clenching her fists and Lieutenant-Commander Estknell looks even grayer than he did initially. Nobody wants this but Lionel is the Exalt and his word is final. It makes Emmeryn sick. She feels tears pricking at her eyes and she blinks them back. Her hands hurt. She wants to vomit.  
  
There’s too much blood rushing in her ears for her to hear the rest of the meeting. Lionel ends it and the rest of the people leave, and Emmeryn is about to skirt off with her tail between her legs but he clears his throat and she freezes, clutching her bag as if her life depends on it. Her dagger is in there. She could end it now.  
  
The room is empty save for them. She doesn’t know where Andrej and Thea went but when she glances back to the doors, they’re gone. Her stomach lurches.  
  
“I thought I made it clear,” her father says, standing, “That you were not to interrupt.”  
  
“I’m sorry,” she whispers. She knows what’s coming.  
  
“You disobeyed me,” he rumbles. “You’re too old for this, Emmeryn. Perhaps it was alright when you were a child, but you _cannot_ stay one forever and you _cannot_ expect this misbehavior to work out for you.”  
  
_I’m nine,_ Emmeryn wants to protest. _Half the time I’m nearly a woman and the other half I’m still only a little girl. Which is it? It can’t be both and I’m tired of it flip-flopping when it suits your purpose._ She says nothing but she feels embers form in her hands. She makes them fizzle out.  
  
“Is it your mother that’s pushed this drivel into you?” Lionel asks. “I should’ve expected this. I know I raised you better.”  
  
“You haven’t raised me at all!” Emmeryn interrupts, then regrets it the moment the words are out. Faster than a man of his size should be able to move, his hand hits her cheek and she feels pain flare. That’s going to leave a welt.  
  
“I raised you _better_ ,” he seethes. “Than to be disrespectful and impudent. What good is an impudent heir? You need to leave this childish rebellion and back-talk behind if you are to be Exalt.”  
  
_I’ve tried to be good,_ she wants to protest. _Every time I try you find something I’ve done wrong_. She bites her tongue instead. _Don’t make it worse,_ she tells herself. But she feels her hands burning and it hurts so much she feels tears rise in her eyes, and she knows she won’t be able to hold it off for much longer. Her heart races. _Burn him,_ something in her chants. _Burn him. Burn him. Burn. Burn. Burn._  
  
“I’m sorry,” she tries to say. Her voice sounds choked. Her cheek stings when he hits it again. His signet ring cuts a gash under her eye. She can feel blood dripping down her cheek. Her head pounds, blood rushing louder than a waterfall. Her hands hurt. She drops her bag. She opens her hands and cinders fall onto the carpet. She brings them up and stares as anger turns to embers, spilling from her palms and fizzling out as they fall to the floor. She feels them bubble and build inside her like the cries in her chest that she stifles at night so as not to wake up Charlotte. It feels, for a split second, like catharsis. But it will take more than a few embers to rid herself of the weight she’s just noticed on her tiny shoulders, pressing itself onto her chest like an anvil. She hadn’t realized it was even there until she got the tiniest little bit of relief, and now it’s unbearable.  
  
She makes the embers stop. She feels her flesh burn, her soft baby palms turning pink and red and white. It will scar. Before she thinks about it, she pulls the knife from her bag.  
  
Well if that’s the way things are going to be, Lionel draws Falchion. “This is foolishness,” he says. “But if you aim to kill me, I will have to strike you down as I would any other soldier.”  
  
Emmeryn cannot reply. She doesn’t want to kill him even if mother said it had to happen— she wishes her parents loved each other and loved their children, that theirs was a union of mutual respect and love instead of a crumbling, bitter joining of spite and cowardice. She often thinks about her dreams of diplomacy, of solving the problem through communication and listening, because that’s what Margaret has taught her is what grown-ups do. She’s thought about taking both her parents and sitting them down and talking them through why they’re so angry, because that’s what Margaret did for her. _The problem isn’t so upsetting if it’s in small pieces,_ Margaret says. She could do the same for her parents. They’d listen to each other, and understand each other, and come to a conclusion that maybe they haven’t been doing their best. But Emmeryn knows now it’s silly and childish, and it doesn’t matter what she says anyway.  
  
But she still doesn’t want to kill him. The tears are rolling down her cheeks too freely for her to bother wiping them away. Something hopeful and fleeting in her mind wonders if it couldn’t be possible to talk it out, to avoid bloodshed. She’s always been scared of blood. She holds up her knife and she lunges.  
  
Luck alone keeps her alive. She’s a small target and she’s fast, and perhaps her father is holding back. But she’s not his daughter anymore, she’s an enemy, and she doesn’t expect mercy. If she slips up, she will die. So she ducks and she swipes blindly, with the skill of one who’s never picked up anything sharper than a letter opener in her life, and it’s over when she sinks her knife into his thigh. She grits her teeth and pushes it in as far as it’ll go, then yanks it out with all of her strength. She feels it scrape bone. Blood sprays. Lionel turns green and falls to his knees, holding himself up with Falchion embedded in the floor.  
  
There’s so _much_ of it. It’s hot and it makes her stomach lurch because there’s so much and it’s not stopping and it’s on her skirt, her knees, her burned hands.  
  
She drops the knife. Make him suffer, something says. There are more embers spilling from her hands and she can’t stop them, and they get hotter as the rushing gets louder. The cuffs of her dress are singed. It’s over and the embers scatter at her feet. There’s blood on the carpet. She can’t hear over the rushing in her ears but she falls to her knees and clenches her fists, willing the embers to stop. They grind into ash when she falls onto them, marring her dress with soot. It is the twenty-seventh of August and Emmeryn is nine, and the Exalt is dead.  
  
How long does she sit there, staring, tears rolling down her cheeks? Emmeryn doesn’t know but when Andrej and Thea come back into the war room to the Exalt dead and the heir in tears next to him, bloody knife on the carpet. Thea pulls her close and stays there and it does not feel like Emmeryn’s daydreams but she finds she really, really doesn’t want to pull away. The embers are cold. She cries.  
  
Word gets out quickly. _The Exalt is dead,_ they say, and once the portcullis guards catch wind of it they repeat it— _the Exalt is dead?_ They ask. _Really? He’s dead?_ And then the citizens in Ylisstol hear it and they chant _the Exalt is dead, the Exalt is dead,_ and it spreads like wildfire through the country and probably to Ferox and Plegia and even Valm. It’s not a celebration so much as it is a breath, a deep breath in of a wind that promises change. The people are still scared and angry, but they are allowed to be.  
  
There are, of course, demands to know who the killer was— because nobody suspects the shaken little girl they found with the Exalt’s body. Nobody suspects the killer was his daughter. They come up with wild tales of who the assassin was and how he got in and out so quickly, without being seen, because people believe what they want to believe. For another three months, there is an uncertain confusion about the castle. Emmeryn is the heir and thus she is the one in charge now, supposedly, but it’s Thea and Andrej who take charge in the immediate aftermath. They say _her Highness just saw her father murdered, let her be_ , and Emm lets them. She pushes the healers away and lets the burns on her hand and the cut on her cheek heal into scars. It feels like they’re supposed to be there— she won’t let herself forget.

 

* * *

  
  
It’s November when she’s crowned, and it’s done hastily in the great hall because she’s spent the past three months making plans and by all the gods she doesn’t believe in she’s going to act on them. Her mother is there, and Charlotte. Her mother says she’s proud after Emmeryn steps up to the throne and they drape the heavy cloak over her shoulders. It’s too big for her and drags on the ground, and the rich green fabric is sweltering even in the early-winter chill. The crown is heavy on her head. She sends it off to be re-forged, sized for her head, as is custom. There’s something about change and metamorphosis there— how even though all Exalts have been of the same blood, they are all different people with different reigns; how the blood of the First Exalt flows strong through their veins and ties them together with the founding of Ylisse itself. Naga’s blood marks them, and the Brand shows when they accept their bloodline for what it is and what it has made them, or something stupidly poetic like that. Or maybe that's all bullshit and it's just a crown.  
  
Mother says she’s proud. Emmeryn doesn’t believe her one bit and she makes this obvious to Florence but to nobody else. Charlotte doesn’t really get it because Charlotte is four but she thinks the crown looks cool. She fiddles with the princess diadem on her head that she only ever wears for formal events like this, nestled in her curls, and says the Exalt's crown is cool because it's not as girly as the diadem. Emmeryn thinks that’s the point. Florence says it’s modeled after the one the Hero-King wore, which is a reasonable guess but Florence probably made that up to answer Charlotte’s question. Whatever. Emm has bigger figurative fish to fry. There’s work to be done and she’s going to have to be the one to do it.  
  
Perhaps the harvests were poor but they have cured meats and dried herbs and preserves in the storerooms, and it’s no rich feast fit for a king (or a young queen, as the case may be) but it’s surely better than subsiding off of game and gathering, and Emm is not going to sit on a mountain of provisions while there are still people starving in the city. So her first order is to fill wagons with food and blankets because the weather’s getting colder and dry firewood for the fires and oil for burning and candles for light. She has the guards raise the rusty portcullis and open the big front gates that have been shut for so long, and she walks out leading three wagons full of provisions, her hood down. She’s making herself purposefully not think about what happens when Frederick sees her.  
  
The protests are back with vigor in Ylisstol and Emm walks right into one. They’re chanting _death to the crusade, death to the crusade,_ and the ringleader is the one burning with anger so bright it could rival the sun. Emm respects that. She burns, too.  
  
When the protesters catch sight of her and the Brand on her forehead she sends the soldiers down to the cathedral with the wagons, and tells them there will be a boy named Frederick there who will know what he means when they say Emm sent them. They salute and bow their heads and follow her order because she may be young but she is still the Exalt. Andrej leads them there and Thea stays with her, lance at her side, at the ready, because even if Emm told her this won’t be violent Thea has been a soldier since she was twenty and is prepared, now more than ever, to lay down her life for what her country stands for. The Ylisse that Thea believes in, that she has believed in with all her heart since she was younger than Emmeryn, is a country built upon the principles of order and justice, hope and courage. There was a time Lionel embodied the spirit of such but the pursuit of justice can very often turn to pursuit of conquest once the conqueror gets an intoxicating taste of true victory, and for a time not a day went by that Thea lived without just a hint of regret for becoming a knight at all. The man she once swore herself to became a single-minded crusader that believed the only way to establish order was to see all opposition crushed, and thus he betrayed the very principles of the country he swore he would lead to the bright, shining peak that is peace. Emmeryn is just what the battered, ruined country that Lionel made of Ylisse needs. So Thea will keep believing in hope and courage and order and justice, and the Pillars of Naga that built this country in the aftermath of the great Schism, and she will dedicate her every remaining breath to protecting the promise of change that Emmeryn has promised to be, _will_ be.  
  
There’s rain on the horizon when the crowd falls silent. Emm can hear it rumbling but she always has been able to— the magic in her veins, the same magic that flows through the ground and gives life to the elements, makes her fingertips tingle when lightning strikes somewhere as if her hands are the ones aching to shoot it, to play with the thunderbolts like they’re tiny figures dancing on her hands. She can feel it but she will not let the coals spill from her palms.  
  
It’s quiet. Emmeryn’s mouth is dry but she speaks. “My name is Emmeryn,” she says, praying she does not sound as small as she feels despite how futile that prayer has always been. Emmeryn doesn’t even believe in any gods so why does she even bother?  
  
Her voice breaks at the end. She ducks her head out of habit but then raises it to speak again. “My name is Emmeryn, and following the death of my father, Exalt Lionel Grace, I’m going to lead Ylisse.” She sounds like a child playing at nobility— which, to some, she is. There is skepticism from the crowd.  
  
The leader makes a disgusted noise. “What can you do that he hasn’t?” she demands. She bears the battle scars of a soldier, half her face twisted into a permanent sneer and one eye covered in a bloody cloth. “Are you to send us off to die as well, as if we haven’t suffered enough?”  
  
“I’m going to end it,” Emmeryn says. “I’m bringing your people home. The war is over, and I intend not to follow in my father’s footsteps.” She sounds stronger there, and she straightens her back, just a little. “You do not have to believe me. My father and the war have failed you all, and for that, I’m sorry on his behalf. There will be no more war— no more of your friends and family sent to their deaths. I give my word now, and should I break it, I accept full responsibility.”  
  
It’s heavy stuff to come from a child— precocious as she is, Emmeryn isn’t even ten yet, and these are the words that come from one much older. The truth is that she’s spent hours poring over her speeches for when she’s Exalt, adapting from history books and novels, trying to polish them to a mirror’s sheen like the armor that Ylissean soldiers wear because if they’re perfect then her father cannot brush her off again. It makes her stomach twist to think that he’d have been angry for her giving such speeches anyway, even if he didn’t even care what they were about.  
  
A rock sails through the air from somebody in the back. They call her a liar and everything after that is a cacophony of shouts and more rocks, more chants, and the rock hits Emmeryn in the forehead just south of her Brand before Thea can lunge forward and knock it out of the air. She tries to keep speaking but it's hard when they shout-- so much shouting, and suddenly Emmeryn feels very small and very scared. The words catch in her throat. She starts to cry despite herself.

The stones clang off of Thea's armor when she scoops Emmeryn into her arms, putting herself between the crowd and Emmeryn. Thea wants to turn to the crowd and demand what's wrong with them, find whoever cast the first stone and beat them to a pulp, but that is not the example a knight of the new chapter of Ylisse should set, and Emmeryn is more important. Thea carries her away from the crowd and sits her down in one of the supply wagons, where the soldiers work distributing rations in too high a volume for the mob to follow.

Thea cleans the blood from the cut on Emmeryn's head with her handkerchief. She runs a blue-glowing thumb across the cut like a mother wiping dirt from her child's face, leaving the cut stitched back together with silvery-looking knit. Emmeryn stares hard at the ground, trying not to let the shaking of her shoulders interrupt Thea.

"I d-didn't do it right," she hiccups. "I'm sorry, Thea. I b-bled all over your handkerchief."

"That's quite all right, your Grace," Thea promises. "I was going to get a new one anyway."  
  
Emmeryn doesn’t feel any better, but Thea gets points for trying. She rubs her eyes with her small hands. It still stings. Perhaps it’s more the reiteration of it’s not good enough that’s twisting the knife. Did she cry when she killed her father? She doesn’t remember anymore.  
  
Running footsteps, splashing in the mud. It’s Frederick, halfway through carrying in a wooden box full of jars of pickled radishes. He stops short when he sees Thea, and it seems to take a moment for the facts to compute. Frederick is an intelligent young man and he can recognize his first and only friend when he sees her features— and really, at this point, how many other nine-year-old blonde girls in Ylisstol are there? The mark on her previously-hidden forehead and the Ylissean soldiers seemingly at her beck and call both answer all his questions and create many, many more.  
  
Emm doesn’t look him in the eye. He hesitates on what to do— should he take a knee and put a fist over his heart, as soldiers do? Or should he be angry, say she’s no Exalt of his, or should he just be angry that she didn’t trust him enough to tell him the truth? (Frederick does have a guess as to why she didn’t tell him the truth. He’s seen her show up with bruises that she doesn’t mention and knows that feeling well enough not to bring it up.)  
  
“I knew there was more to you than meets the eye,” he finally says, bowing his head to her in respect. “Your Grace.”  
  
“You don’t have to call me that,” she says. “We’re… we’re still friends, right? Even though I lied to you?”  
  
He hadn’t thought of that. He’d always thought of the Exalt as being a distant figure with a Naga-ordained right to rule, mysterious and operating on a level above mortality but below divinity, because no mortal can truly be divine. A messenger of Naga, like the priests always said the Exalt was supposed to be. Given the war Frederick isn’t impressed, but then he thinks that if anybody can be a messenger of Naga, it’s Emm.  
  
“Yes,” he says. “We are.”  
  
Emm, though she knows it’s not ladylike, fidgets with the sleeves of her coat. Her face is red and puffy, and Thea wipes away her tears. “Are you angry at me?”  
  
“Why would I be?” Frederick asks, puzzled. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”  
  
“I lied to you,” Emm mumbles, ducking her head. She seems to shrink and it’s a very odd look on her, that Frederick has seen. She’s not a fountain of sunshine from what he’s used to, certainly, but to him she’s always seemed vaguely otherworldly— like the stars leaned in closer and the wind hushed so she could speak, as if the energy of the world itself curved just a bit around her. She had an odd sort of gravity that, likely, was innate as opposed to practiced, and that Frederick had never really experienced before. He figured that, if Naga’s messengers walked the mortal plane as they did in stories, if they were even real, she probably was one and it’d only hurt his puny mortal mind if he knew the truth. So he didn’t really think about it, and to him she was just his friend Emm, who trailed her hand along fences and walls when they walked and who had to jump over every puddle instead of stepping in it, who delivered a bag full of food as often as she could that wasn’t much but still helped a great deal. The ethereal air had always been there, a little bit, but now it was gone entirely and she was just a girl with the weight of the world on her tiny shoulders, with a gash on her forehead and with tears threatening to well up in the corners of her eyes, looking like it was taking all of her courage not to run away and hide.  
  
“It’s alright,” Frederick promises. “I’m glad you can tell me the truth now. Why couldn’t you before?”  
  
“That’s a secret,” Emm says, looking up a little bit, the tiniest hint of an enigmatic smile showing on her tear-stained face. “Are you sure you’re not angry?”  
  
“I promise I’m not,” Frederick says. “Friends don’t lie to each other, right?”  
  
“Right,” Emm nods. “Thank you, Frederick.” She doesn’t look ready to bolt anymore, which is a good sign.  
  
There’s a moment where Frederick wonders what they are now— but it’s a foolish question. Of _course_ they’re still friends. Frederick has never had a real friend before and he doesn’t much want to stop being friends with Emmeryn on the sole basis that it’s improper, or something. Where would that leave him, and more so, where would that leave her? Frederick has not known her very long but he knows that hurting her would be doing the unthinkable. It would be cruel, and it would not be what a knight does. He supposes his dreams of loyal knights devoted body and spirit to their cause are somewhat childish considering reality, but he never had any illusions when he left home for his apprenticeship that knighthood would be sunshine and rainbows. It may even be better that he’s already found what he’s fighting for— for Emmeryn, so she can enact her dreams of helping people and returning the country to what it once was, what it always had the potential to be. So that even if she must live with the burden of ruling upon her shoulders, he can do his best to make the load as light as he can.  
  
But for now it’s time for her to try again. She walks back out into the streets with her two knights, one on each side, and Frederick vows that one day he’ll be one of them— a shield at her side, guarding her from the stones a tired people may throw.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> best part of writing all these npcs: like half of them are my dragon age characters and nobody can tell me i cant do that


	3. Summer's Overture

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Emmeryn bristles, reflexively, at the harsh truth of Thea’s words. “I can decide for myself—“ she begins._
> 
> _“Your Grace,” Thea says pointedly. “I respect your authority. I know that you intend to do the best you can with the power you’ve been given through circumstances that were not your choice. I am not questioning your agency.”_
> 
> _Emm is quiet. She bites down, hard, on the inside of her cheek, and looks at the baseboard on the opposite wall._
> 
> Emmeryn begins the long, hard process of learning to be young.

Winter is cold in Ylisse. Frozen wind sweeps down from Ferox and coats the country in frost, from the lakes and forests in the north to the border highlands in the west to the cold eastern coasts to the swamplands and plains and hills in the south. It’s less intense in the south but it’s still cold, and with the massive Daten Lake north of Ylisstol, the city gets the worst of it. It’s a particularly cold winter this year, and this is when Emmeryn invites the people in to the warmth of the castle. Not everyone takes her up on it right away, mind, but word spreads that it is true what she promises about giving food and warmth, and eventually those who took shelter in the chapel now take it in the throne room of the castle. Emmeryn has her people set up cots and bedrolls, and she has the surviving clerics and doctors ensure that those who are sick get healed. In the meantime the rebuilding can begin, patching up the damage of the riots and of simple disrepair that comes because those who were fit to build and repair were all conscripted. Many of the people ask if there is anything they can do to help, and she allows them to help, promising she will have them paid for their service when coin flows again. The ones who want to, she has them help her soldiers rebuild. It’s a process.  
  
But there are still people in the city, people coming home and people chasing rumors of the new Exalt. Some of them are angry, as people are, and disrupt the process of rebuilding. Emmeryn listens to them when they protest and dodges the stones and torches hefted her way, though she’s not always fast enough. But the listening part is what helps the most. When the wagons run out of food, sometimes she’ll come back to the castle with more people for her cause. She thinks that eventually the amount of angry people will die down and she can listen to them herself, and then maybe they won’t be as angry as they were.  
  
Emmeryn celebrates her tenth nameday on the twenty-third of December, with Frederick and a lumpy cranberry-walnut cake he made himself in a glass jar. It’s a cake in name only because the outside is burned and the inside is mushy, but Emm eats it anyway and when all is said and done, it tastes fine. Charlotte gives her a fantasy novel that she knows Margaret had picked out quite a long time ago and her mother does not get her a gift because she say she’s too old for birthday presents now but she does give some advice— she will have to deal with other countries someday, and they will likely not take her seriously due to her age. In the face of this, she has to remain strong-willed. Emmeryn wishes her mother would stop giving her advice because it’s always the kind of advice that Florence herself never takes. Frederick’s other gift is the best, though. It’s a lumpy green scarf that he made himself, and it’s itchy and far too long for her but it keeps her ears warm in the cold Ylisse winter.

Officially the new year begins on the first of Janaff— that is what the calendar says, and what the church says, but the real new year will begin when the ice on Daten Lake cracks. With the bitter cold before the thaw, people’s anger chills to bitterness, which is somehow easier to deal with. She tells her people that they do not have to build through the freeze, but there are volunteers that do anyway. She has yet to figure out why.  
  
(The reason, at least to them, is simple— there is something about Emmeryn and something about the timing of when she took the throne that promises hope, promises change, and even if there are those who are tired of fighting for an Exalt, tired of being ordered about like dogs, Emmeryn has proven at least to them that she cares, that she will not have them fight if they do not believe in her cause. If the war has taught Emm anything it’s that she is not the ruler by divine right of Naga, no matter what the law or the church says. Regardless of what it says on paper, she is ruler by the grace of the people, and she owes it to them to keep her promise of protection. Her father, and doubtless countless others before her, took this for granted. Emm is determined not to, and this, the people can see.)  
  
They burn her father’s shroud once preparations are complete, in the beginning of Fae. He would’ve wanted it traditional, so traditional it is— the family and close friends, and a priest with a book who says the blessings to Naga. They launch his body in a little wooden boat carved with the House Grace coat of arms and because Florence is too weak to do it, Arno launches the fireball at the pyre and it burns. Emm wishes she could’ve done it, a little bit, because it’d be some way to release the fires burning in her veins, but she’d be kidding herself if she thought she were strong enough to launch a single fireball at a small target without burning herself and everyone in the vicinity to a crisp.  
  
They’re all dressed in black. Emmeryn hates it. But even if she’s the Exalt she is still only a child, and she cannot disobey her mother when her mother says they have to go to the funeral. Emm doesn’t want to go to the funeral— what right does she have when she’s his killer? Florence knows this and Florence, in an uncharacteristic display of assertiveness, confronts her on it when they’re back at the castle.  
  
“Are you feeling well, Emmeryn?” Florence asks. The words make Emmeryn’s little fists clench.  
  
“Yes,” Emm lies. “I did what you told me to. He’s dead.”  
  
“The ultimate result.” She says it so passively, like it was what was _bound_ to happen whether Emm did it or not— and why that makes Emmeryn grit her teeth and tremble, the magic in her veins heating her up beneath her collar and making her uncomfortably, pricklingly warm, she does not have the skill to say. _Why have me kill him at all, if you’re just going to act like it was fated?_ Emm wants to demand. But she’s ten and has not been taught how to put her feelings into words, so it’s a whirl of angry red and sickening orange, like dancing fires threatening to lick her skirts and consume, _consume_.  
  
Florence sets a cold hand on her shoulder. She’s getting weaker and Emm knows carrying her third child is taking a lot out of her. She’s going to die. Emm wants to reach up and burn Florence’s frail hand to a crisp.  
  
“You did what must be done,” Florence says. “I am proud of you.”  
  
Emm bristles. “You’re not,” she says without thinking.  
  
Florence withdraws her hand. “Pardon me?” she says, tone icy-cold. Her parents have always been so cold, even when Emm herself burns white-hot.  
  
But it’s too late to stop and Emm burns. She clenches her fists so hard her fingernails cut tiny c-shaped cuts in the pink burn-scars covering her palms. “You’re not _proud_. You’re just glad I did what you told me to. You’re glad I killed him because you’re too _cowardly_ to do it yourself.” Emm braces herself for the hand across her cheek.  
  
Florence is silent. Somehow that’s worse.  
  
She makes herself stare Florence in the eye. “I am your Exalt,” she says, eyes burning. “I’ve taken the vows to protect my people from threats— and _you_ , Florence Grace, are a threat. Do not presume I’ll pardon you because you gave birth to me.”  
  
“Emmeryn,” Florence says. “My daughter—“  
  
“Don’t call me that!” Emm snaps. “That doesn’t _mean_ anything! I was Exalt Lionel’s daughter, too, and look where that got him! Are you somehow _audacious_ enough that to think that will protect you from me? Or are you just _hiding_ , hiding behind words and titles?”  
  
Emm thinks it should be satisfying— letting her words burn instead of her hands, as if she’s putting the power of a branding iron into what she says. But it just makes her angrier and she feels tears welling up in her eyes. Or are they falling? Does she really have that much control over this? Perhaps she’d like to, but she doesn’t.  
  
It’s not satisfying. She wants to burn everything to cinders. And then Florence is gone, and Emm is alone, clenching her burn-scarred hands.  
  
Florence dies in the end of Fae when Emmeryn’s baby sister is born and Emm knew it was going to happen. She wonders if the cruel, caustic words she shouted were part of the reason. She tries to force herself to not care, and does not succeed.  
  
The baby was due to be born in Abel, but it happens too early and she’s born just before the spring thaw when the ice is waning on the lake. They don’t tell Emm outright but she hears the whispers— _grew in wrong,_ the clerics say. _Wrong side. Wrong way up. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong._ Emm knows it’s medical in nature because there’s a chance of both her mother and her new sibling dying because of it, but she can’t help but feel a prickle of protectiveness for the baby. _My brother or sister isn’t wrong_ , she thinks.  
  
The baby is a little girl and she’s very small and very round, like a little loaf of bread, and she doesn’t want to come uncurled. Emm is waiting outside the door of the delivery room with Charlotte and she hears the baby crying and crying, and she doesn’t seem to want to stop. Emm understands. Sometimes she feels like crying, too.  
  
Doctor Ademar, with his round face and kind smile, asks them if they want to meet their new baby sister. And Charlotte bounces up in excitement because she’s never met a baby and she’s delighted she’s not the youngest anymore, but Emm shakes her head. _I’m busy,_ she says. But she really wants nothing to do with another child of House Grace that’s going to end up just like her.  
  
It’s very strange and Emm can hear people whispering of it— they’re whispers of pity, mostly, and wonderment. _Losing her father took such a toll on her,_ they say. _Such a tragedy._ They speak of her as if she’s dead or gravely ill and it angers her; she keeps her fists closed so the embers don’t spill from her burn-scarred palms.  
  
The baby is too small and she doesn’t want to stop crying, but she survives. They decide that she’s strong enough on the sixth of Marth, when the daffodils have bloomed and a breeze sweeps through Ylisstol, and when Emmeryn is outside she smells something besides ash— she smells wildflowers and fresh hay. She’s the one to name the baby and she names her Elisabeth Calista, and Doctor Ademar says that’s a good choice because he recalls quite a few Graces of decades past named Elisabeth and Calista, but Emmeryn secretly knows the reason she named the baby that is because Elisabeth and Calista are characters in the novel she’s reading.  
  
Charlotte calls her Lissa. Emmeryn doesn’t.  
  
Emmeryn revitalizes the mail system in Abel and starts writing letters to the other nations— to Ferox, to the territories of Valm, even to Plegia. The farmers return home in time to start planting for summer. The soldiers return to Ylisstol from the battlefields, weary and battle-scarred. Emm goes out and talks people through their anger and their hurt and they ring the bells in the cathedral on Sunday for the first time since the war began. In Abel, reconstruction of the central district in Ylisstol is completed and rebuilding the university begins. Frederick convinces her to reopen enlistment to Ylisse’s army in Mia and to Emmeryn’s surprise, recruits swarm to enlist once they hear of it. They’re mostly Frederick’s age and older, youngsters looking for a better life after the war took their homes, or youngsters who have seen their battle-worn parents and siblings return and have decided that that is enough of that.  
  
They are midway through Mia. Charlotte has taken to announcing the coming of her fifth birthday to everyone who will listen— and as the princess and next in line for the crown should anything happen to Emmeryn, everyone must. Emmeryn has started building the Ylissean Institute of Magic and Related Sciences in what had been a vacant area on the lakeshore. The news attracts scholars and mages and the High Enchanter very quickly runs out of room in her small office in the Mages’ Tower in the castle to keep all the applications. Inns are rebuilt. Shops reopen. Houses go up where once was rubble. Emmeryn has part of the castle grounds opened and converted into a public amphitheater. The dust from the renovation gets everywhere, but she’s certain it’ll be worth it.  
  
So it’s midway through Mia when Emmeryn runs out of work to do. Arno and his team of delegates and attachés are the one in charge of all the paperwork and budgeting and such— they were when her father was Exalt and Emmeryn sees no reason to change that, since Arno is still very good at what he does— and everything she’d need to officially enact has been done. Merchants have started to come from the farmlands with crops and goods. People have gone back to what they did before all of this began. The soldiers are on their way home. The rocky beginnings of rebuilding a broken country are over and Ylisse’s spirits are on the rise. Everyone is so glad that the war is over, really over, and they finally have a chance to breathe that there are very few complaints with the way Emmeryn is ruling.  
  
Naturally, this is a problem.  
  
And of course Thea is the one to notice. Emmeryn is not usually restless when she has free time— she’ll usually spend it in the library, poring over books. On good days she’ll curl up in her favorite chair and read her favorite storybooks, or maybe flip through a volume of something she doesn’t know. Thea has seen her with books on astronomy, medicine, history, and botany. There’s no telling how much of it she actually understands, but they don’t exactly make books on such topics for children. On bad days she’ll curl up in her favorite chair and read from a compendium of famous trials, even though she knows all the details of Crown vs. Brannon and Ansleigh-Lowell vs. Fletcher. This is one of those very small things Thea has picked up in her service to House Grace.  
  
But now she can’t focus on one book because she’ll pick one up and put it down after half a page. She’ll polish the blade of that knife she’s taken to carrying until there’s not a speck of dirt left on it. She’ll sit her dolls up on their shelf but not bother playing with them. She’ll start a board game with Frederick when he has free time and surrender halfway through. She paces the castle and fidgets like it’s a formal gown that fits her in all the wrong ways, like it’s too hot if she keeps it on but too cold if she switches to something with shorter sleeves. Thea has seen this before— what Emmeryn needs is a change of scenery.  
  
Convincing Andrej and Emmeryn’s circle of advisors that she needs a vacation is easy. Convincing Frederick and Charlotte to come along is easy. Convincing Emmeryn herself is hard.  
  
“No,” is her first response. “I don’t want to.” Which is the kind of thing that a child does when the only discipline they know is being hit— as soon as the person doing the hitting is gone, they become defiant because nobody else can hit them. Thea sighs.  
  
“Enderwick is a lovely place,” she tries again. “It’s like the lake manor, but better, because it’s an entire town.”  
  
“I didn’t like the lake manor either,” Emmeryn says stubbornly. “I don’t like outside, especially in the summer. It’s too hot and too bright and there are too many bugs— noisy, disgusting bugs that crawl all over and bite you and make you itch. I don’t like it.”  
  
“You won’t have to go outside,” Thea promises. “My husband isn’t a big fan of the outdoors, either.”  
  
Emmeryn remains unconvinced. She takes her book of trials off her shelf and lets it fall open to a random page, deciding the conversation is over.  
  
But Thea will not bow so easily. “Your Grace,” she repeats. “This is in your best interests. If you refuse to do it for yourself, then do it for Charlotte— she hasn’t ever been to the lake manor, has she? It’ll be her first big trip. Of course Lissa can’t go, she’s still too young to travel, but Charlotte would be thrilled to have a new place to explore.”  
  
That got Thea’s foot in the door. Emmeryn hesitates turning the next page.  
  
“And,” Thea continues, eyes sparkling, “I’d wager that between the town and the farm and my kids, Charlotte would be far too busy playing to disturb you.”  
  
And Emmeryn has to admit that it’s tempting. She loves Charlotte, she really does, but lately she’s been even more bothersome than usual. She just doesn’t understand that Emmeryn has responsibilities now and she can’t always play. Maybe if she brought her books with her, and arranged to have reports delivered…  
  
Emmeryn sighs. “Alright,” she caves. “But only if I don’t have to go outside.”  
  
“Only if you want to,” Thea promises. But this is a victory. They’d work on the going outside thing later.  
  
So begins the summer spent in Enderwick. It’s three and a half hours away by carriage and that’s far enough that Emmeryn wouldn’t even think about making the trip if it weren’t an event. But Thea talks about it like it’s the right distance for a day trip— although Thea also says that her house is half an hour’s walk from the town hub like it’s no distance at all, so Emmeryn thinks that one’s sense of scale depends on what they’re used to.  
  
As far as Emmeryn knows, Enderwick wasn’t hit hard by any rioting. It's a decent-sized town, though more sprawling in its construction, rather like someone had thrown an overripe peach on the ground and let the way the juice spread determine the layout of the streets. It is surrounded by farms and ranches and forests, and Thea says that the River Morrigan runs through the town, downstream from Ylisstol’s Daten Lake.  
  
Frederick grew up in Ansburg, about half an hour more’s ride from Enderwick and on the eastern coast of Daten Lake. It’s about equal in size to Enderwick and it was founded at about the same time, so they share a schoolhouse halfway between them and often meet halfway to trade. Sometimes children from Enderwick will come up to Ansburg’s fish markets after school to get fresh fish for dinner, and likewise, citizens of Ansburg will visit Enderwick for fresh grain and produce. He’s supposedly friends with a kid from Enderwick, or at least he was before he left home for his apprenticeship, but given the way Frederick’s jaw tenses when he mentions this friend, Emmeryn figures there’s more to it than that. A bit of prodding yields that this same friend tackled him into the lake one time. He doesn’t remember what it was about. But he does admit that they’re friends.  
  
Charlotte is napping in the carriage and Emm is reading when they arrive at Thea’s farmhold. It’s not long before lunchtime. They’ve been riding past fields and orchards and forests for ] hours— Thea’s appears to be mostly stalks of corn, though Emm can see forests in the hills behind. There are wooden fences on either side stopping the grass from overtaking the road— though the weeds choking the cracked, weathered cobblestone are making a valiant effort anyway. How much corn does someone need to grow? Emmeryn eyes the fields with a hint of disdain. Surely using _this_ much space to _just_ grow corn is a waste. That space could be used for something else, like— like a library or a public garden, or a library with a garden. Unless corn really _does_ need that much space, or the world really _does_ need that much corn.  
  
There’s a sign on the front gate. Its white paint is chipped and peeling, and _GALE_ is written on it in big green letters. A gray tabby cat lounges on top of the sign, absorbing the sunshine like cats do. It looks up when it hears the horses, and leaps off to disappear into the cornfields.  
  
Thea dismounts her horse. “That’s as far as the carriage can take you,” she says. “The road to the house is too narrow for this thing.”  
  
Emmeryn feels her face twist. They have to walk the rest of the way? The house looks like it’s at least a mile from the road. “Oh,” she says.  
  
“It’s good exercise,” Thea promises. She tips the carriage driver with a sovereign from her purse. “I think we’re just in time for lunch.”  
  
“Oh,” Emm says again. Somehow it feels like it’s going to be a long summer.  
  
But somehow she survives the walk to the house and she survives lunch— it’s very thick, hearty food with lots of butter that isn’t as rich as what she’s used to in the castle, but somehow it feels like there’s more of it. Charlotte inhales half her plate before Emm reminds her to use her manners, and then she shifts from inhaling it to simply devouring it after Emm wipes the grease and crumbs off her chin.  
  
It’s definitely not a castle. It’s a big blue farmhouse with peeling paint and far more shingles than are necessary, hammered on haphazardly like the one doing the job had better things to do. It’s surrounded with trees that don’t look like they’ve been trimmed in years. There are vines climbing the walls and trying to return the house to nature. Emmeryn spots boards nailed into the trunk of one of the trees— why, she doesn’t know. There’s a little wooden swing with dirty ropes hanging from another branch. Emm can see it through the window in the dining area. It is, in fact, the first thing that Charlotte goes to investigate when she’s washed up after lunch.  
  
Thea’s husband is named Archimedes and he’s just as big and bulky as Thea, except his bulk is in fat that rests at his gut and hangs off his arms. He has silver hair despite not being old, in loose waves longer than Emm is used to seeing on men, and it matches his beard. He smiles more with his eyes than his mouth. He has little round glasses resting on the end of his short nose, and his shirt is buttoned up wrong, and his craftsman’s leather apron and gloves are smeared with soot. He looks kind. Emmeryn doesn’t trust him. But he shows her to the bookshelf and it has books she hasn’t read on it so she supposes he’s okay.  
  
She’s deep into a book about fairies and the dangerous machinations of their fictional politics when Charlotte places a small, grubby hand on her arm. Emmeryn tries not to let her face wrinkle in disgust, but it’s muddy and there’s pond scum under Charlotte’s tiny nails. Her dress is dirty. She’s trailed dirt and pond water into the house.  
  
“Emm,” she says, eyes wide and sparkling. “Emmy, lookit.”  
  
Emm does not lookit. “Charlotte, you’re a mess,” she scolds. “You tracked mud all through the house.”  
  
“Sorry,” Charlotte says. “But— Emm. Emm, lookit! I found a friend!”  
  
To her credit, Emmeryn does not roll her eyes. “A friend?”  
  
Charlotte produces a frog. It’s small and green and it croaks when it hops out of Charlotte’s hands and onto Emm’s lap. Emmeryn wants to scream.  
  
Charlotte grabs it again. “His name’s Chauncey,” she says proudly. “I caught him all by myself with Freddy’s help.”  
  
“Oh,” Emm manages. “That’s— great, Charlotte. Put Chauncey back now.”  
  
“I will,” Charlotte tells her. “Freddy says frogs aren’t happy inside ‘cause there’s not enough flies. They do like _this_ to catch them— see!” She sticks out her tongue as far as it’ll go, which isn’t far, and retracts it quickly. “Snap ‘em _right_ out of the air. They’re like cats with mice ‘cept they’re slimy an’ not furry an’ they eat flies ‘stead of mice.”  
  
“They do eat flies, yes,” Emmeryn agrees. She tries to push her disgust down and return to her book. But Charlotte tugs on the sleeve of her dress, insistent upon something or other. She scowls.  
  
“Emm, Emm, come see,” she insists. “Freddy an’ I found Chauncey’s home in the woods! It’s real nice. Come see?”  
  
“I’m reading right now,” Emmeryn replies.  
  
“Reading can go later,” Charlotte suggests. “Come see, Emm? It’s real nice, promise! Cross my heart! Please, Emmy?” She draws a cross over the right side of her chest.  
  
“Your heart’s on your other side,” Emm points out.  
  
“Cross my heart,” Charlotte repeats, crossing the left side of her chest this time. “Please? It’ll be real, real quick an’ you can go back to reading after! It’s not far! Please?” Her lower lip trembles. Emmeryn prepares to refuse again and Charlotte stomps her foot in frustration.  
  
“You never wanna do things I wanna do!” she protests. “You’re always working and boring stuff ‘cause you got responserbileries or whatever! How come you’re no fun anymore, huh? How come you never smile anymore?”  
  
“Charlotte—“ Emm tries to say.  
  
Charlotte sniffles. “I just wanna show you the pond,” she whimpers. “S’not even a game or anything!”  
  
Emmeryn sighs. “Fine, I’ll come see Chauncey’s pond.”  
  
The whimpers vanish. Charlotte lights up. “Hooray!” she cheers. She grabs one of Emm’s hands in her own grubby one and starts towing her towards the front door. “Emmy’s comin’ to see the pond!”  
  
“Yes, yes,” Emm mumbles. She makes a mental note to apologize to Thea about the mess later.  
  
Emmeryn does not like being outside. She hates bugs and hates getting too hot, and her chest hurts when she runs or plays physically anyway. Flowers make her sneeze, the wind musses her hair in ways she doesn’t like, and she hates feeling dirt under her nails. She’s tried reading outside before because her physician says the fresh air would do her good, but the breeze just rustled the pages of her book and made it impossible to focus. She learned how to swim several years ago but the water in lakes and ponds is always far too cold for her liking and she doesn’t have enough fat on her bones to be able to stay in for long enough to have fun. She can’t climb, she can’t run, she hates bugs, she’s allergic to wildflowers, she thinks grass is too itchy, and she’s just an indoor child to begin with— it’s exactly this kind of thing that is a recipe for not having a good time out on Thea’s farm.  
  
Charlotte leads her to a pond made with a stream that’s likely branched off the River Morrigan. It’s perhaps two feet deep at its deepest point. There’s a footbridge leading across the stream down another little trail, leading into the forest one way and back towards the house in the other. Frederick and two other older children with silver-blue hair like Thea’s are sitting with their feet in the stream, chatting about something Emm can’t hear.  
  
They look up when Charlotte approaches with Emm in tow. Frederick looks like he always does save for the freckles showing themselves on his cheeks and nose, but the two with him are new. They’re tall and broad and stocky, their skin tough and browned from days in spent in the sunshine. They both have red eyes and silvery-blue hair, short and coarse but very thick and messy. One of them is carrying two fishing poles and the other has a big wooden bucket, likely full of fish. The one with the bucket is talking animatedly to Frederick, hands gesturing with every half-sentence like they have so much energy that not moving while speaking would make them explode. The two of them seem to radiate life, like they’re beings knit from the cornstalks and apple blossoms on the fields of Thea’s farmhold, sewn together with sunshine and grown from fertile soil.  
  
“Hey, Charlie is back!” the one talking calls. She waves to Charlotte, who bounces excitedly and waves back. Poor Chauncey is stuck in her hand as she does so, as the other is holding Emmeryn’s. “Who’s that with you?”  
  
“This is my big sister,” Charlotte says. “I wanted to show her the pond where I found Chauncey. But I gotta let him go now ‘cause Emm said so.”  
  
Frederick stands and bobs his head. “Your Grace,” he says. “Did she track mud into the house?”  
  
“Unfortunately, yes,” Emm sighs. “I was looking forward to getting some reading done, but I suppose that wasn’t meant to be.”  
  
One of the twins snorts. It’s not a mean sound— it’s genuinely amused, like she can’t believe her eyes. “So ma _wasn’t_ joking when she said we were having royalty for houseguests! And the Exalt herself, no less. Hey, your Grace, what’d you do to get _Freddy_ as a bodyguard?”  
  
Emmeryn isn’t sure she likes this one’s tone. “Forgive me, but I don’t know you,” she says icily. “And it’s _very_ rude to talk to a girl before you’ve been introduced and before you know her name.”  
  
Frederick sighs. “Your Grace,” he says.  
  
He doesn’t even say what he’s thinking but Emmeryn knows he has a point. She glares fiercely at him for a second before taking a breath. “Fine,” she admits. “Fine, forgive me. I’m a bit tense from the work being done in Ylisstol— I’m having the castle renovated and there are many improvements being made to the city. I am Emmeryn Grace, Exalt of Ylisse. You may call me Emmeryn, for the sake of the… _informal_ environment.” Because that’s what Emmeryn was taught is the right way to introduce oneself. Name and title and preferred nomenclature, all in the first sentence. All the important stuff right up front.  
  
“She ran outta papers to work on,” Charlotte adds. Emm flushes in embarrassment.  
  
“Hush,” she hisses. “Don’t be rude, Charlotte.”  
  
Charlotte rolls her eyes, but quiets anyway. She crouches to put Chauncey gently back into the pond. Relieved to be free, the frog swims away.  
  
The twin that’s done all the talking thus far folds her arms. Her loose cotton shirt has no sleeves and it allows Emmeryn to see that she’s strong and healthy and could probably pick up both Emmeryn and Charlotte with very little effort. She and her twin— sister? Brother? Something else?— both look about twelve, younger than Frederick but not by very much.  
  
“And I thought Freddy was kidding when he said they were all real formal in the city,” she comments. “Very well, your Fantastic Princessliness. I’m Phila and the quiet one is my brother, Phobos. We’re friends of Freddy here.”  
  
“We’re _not_ friends,” Frederick says stiffly.  
  
“We’re _best_ friends,” Phila corrects, grinning and affectionately slugging him in the shoulder. Frederick is quite strong himself, but he exhales sharply when the punch connects. “Did he tell you that story about getting tackled into the lake in Ansburg? That was _me_.”  
  
Emmeryn doesn’t quite know what to say to that. Phobos grins brightly, one side of his mouth reaching higher than the other, when he sees her glancing his direction. He’s quieter than his sister by far— Phila is probably the older one. He has several chipped teeth and a stalk of wheat grass sticking out of his mouth.  
  
“So how am I supposed to do the proper greetings, huh?” Phila wonders aloud, standing and hopping over the footbridge to Emmeryn. Emmeryn stiffens. Phila is at _least_ a foot taller than she is. “Do I bow and scrape? Do I pledge my undying loyalty?”  
  
“That won’t be necessary,” Emmeryn says. “The introduction was fine.”  
  
“I just don’t want to step on any toes, is all,” Phila says. “So, _your Magnificent Gracefulness_ —“  
  
“Emmeryn is _fine_ ,” Emm grinds out.  
  
“ _Your Splendiferous Incredible Pureness_ ,” Phila continues. Emm is almost certain she’s teasing and it irks her— what right does Phila have to tease her? She’d expected a level conversation, not— not whatever it was that was actually happening. “Know anything about fishing?”  
  
Emmeryn folds her arms. “No,” she says. By now Charlotte has found a stick and is playing with the minnows in the stream.  
  
“You can catch tiddlers in these streams,” Phila continues. “With your hands if you’re fast. Watch this.”  
  
Emm absolutely does not want to. But she folds her arms and watches anyway. Phila crouches on the bank, hands over the water. Then suddenly she plunges them into the stream, splashing a wave of water onto the bank. The pond water gets onto Emmeryn’s skirt and she stumbles back, disgusted. But Phila has a little silvery fish in her hands and she’s grinning like she just won a prize.  
  
“See, here we go,” she says proudly. “Wanna see?”  
  
Emmeryn makes a disgusted noise. Phila, grinning widely, holds her hands out with the fish in it— the fish, being a fish with the primary directive of staying alive, fops helplessly on Phila’s hard-palmed hands, toughened with work and play alike. As luck would have it, it flops right off her hands and towards Emmeryn.  
  
Emmeryn, being Emmeryn, makes a face of absolute revulsion and stumbles back— right off the bank and into the pond. She lands in the stream with a splash that sends a wave of water sloshing over the footbridge, Phobos and Frederick’s ankles, and Charlotte’s hands in the water.  
  
“Your Grace!” Frederick yelps, quickly helping her out. Emmeryn, still processing the past several seconds, shivers. It may be summer, but the pond water is cold and it’s soaking through her shoes and stockings. Now there’s pond scum and algae sticking in slimy clumps to her dress, and it’s on her hands and her shoes squelch when Frederick helps her stand.  
  
She shoves him off. “ _Don’t_ touch me,” she orders, voice sharp. “And _you_ —“ she advances on Phila, suddenly a pint-sized force of nature fueled chiefly by rage. Phila had looked concerned when she fell and reaches out a hand as if to check on her, but Emm smacks it away.  
  
“Don’t,” she orders.  
  
“I just want to see if you’re okay,” Phila says. “It’s kind of a drop into the bank, and you fell right on your—“  
  
“ _Don’t_ ,” Emmeryn snaps again. “Don’t. You have lost the right to address me. If you _must_ speak to me, from this point you will refer to me only as _your Grace_ or _your Highness._ Now I will leave you to your silly children’s games with fish and pond scum, and if you expect me to participate in any more _foolishness_ , consider yourself unwelcome in Ylisstol. Am I clear?”  
  
“Your Grace—“ Frederick attempts.  
  
“Good,” Emmeryn says firmly. Then she turns on her heel and marches, shoes squelching with pond water, all the way back to the house.  
  
Thea’s cleaning the mud off the floor when Emmeryn returns, her skirts dripping and stained green with pond scum. She drops the ratty cleaning rag in the garbage and then turns to see Emm on the porch, dripping wet and looking extremely upset.  
  
“Your Grace—“ Thea says in surprise. “What—“  
  
Emmeryn inhales shakily. “I want to go home,” she says, sounding close to tears.  
  
“We can arrange that,” Thea promises, crouching to Emmeryn’s level and checking her over. “Did you fall in the pond?”  
  
Emm nods. She wants to say it was Phila’s fault, but it really wasn’t, not that much, and she doesn’t trust herself to speak without bursting into tears.  
  
“Oh, dear,” Thea hums. “That’ll stain terribly. And that fabric is so heavy, no wonder you’re miserable. Come upstairs with me, your Grace— I’ve got just the thing.”  
  
The thing is a dress. It’s made of soft cotton and the stitches are bigger than Emmeryn is used to seeing. The top half is a light shade of blue that matches the sky exactly, and the skirt is red plaid on a white background. There are two big pockets stitched into the skirt with blue flowers embroidered onto the white fabric, with little red buttons as the centers. There are matching red buttons fastening the collar shut. It’s far plainer than anything Emmeryn is used to— even if the shortages in Ylisstol meant what she wore was plainer than what was typically expected of her station, everything else she had was made of fine fabrics with lace and millions of tiny, satin-covered buttons.  
  
In the wood-framed mirror in the upstairs guest room, Emmeryn looks at herself. She’d scrubbed at her skin until all the pond scum was gone and what was left was raw and pink, and tried in vain to tame her golden curls— especially the one that always fell over her forehead, obscuring her Brand. The dress Thea gave her stops just below her knees (it’s made for someone taller and wider than Emmeryn is, though not by very much) and the sleeves stop just above her elbows. There are no lace or ruffles or bows anywhere— just the embroidered flowers and the big red buttons. She looks different. She no longer looks like the child-queen of Ylisse.  
  
She removes her circular crown and sets it on the chest of drawers. Now she really looks different. It’s strange. She feels like she could go back outside and Frederick would call her Emm again. She isn’t sure how to feel about this. What is she but the Exalt? Without the Exalt, who is Emmeryn Grace?  
  
Thea gently knocks on her door. Emmeryn opens it. Thea crouches again, checking to see if the dress fits. “It’s a little baggy around here, but I’ll take the waist in and it should fit better,” she decides. “Don’t worry, your Grace. A bit of soaking and we’ll have the pond scum out of your dress and have it good as new.”  
  
Emmeryn doesn’t really care about that dress. “Thank you,” she says anyway. “You didn’t have to.”  
  
“I wanted to,” Thea promises. “Your Grace, if I may speak frankly—” she doesn’t need to ask that either, but Emm nods anyway, so she continues, “I insisted on this trip for the sake of _your_ health— not Charlotte’s enjoyment. It may not be exactly what you want it to be the entire time, but if you spend your entire life cloistered away in your castle with your laws and your orders, with nobody around to teach you what the world is like and how to talk to people, you’ll never be an effective Exalt. Instead you’ll be an overgrown child with power over hundreds and hundreds of people and nothing but your own stunted emotional compass to guide you.”  
  
Emmeryn bristles, reflexively, at the harsh truth of Thea’s words. “I can decide for myself—“ she begins.  
  
“Your Grace,” Thea says pointedly. “I respect your authority. I know that you intend to do the best you can with the power you’ve been given through circumstances that were not your choice. I am not questioning your _agency_.”  
  
Emm is quiet. She bites down, hard, on the inside of her cheek, and looks at the baseboard on the opposite wall.  
  
Thea, gently and where Emm can see her hand and react to it accordingly, sets her hand on Emm’s shoulder. Emmeryn stiffens for an instant in response, just out of instinct, but makes herself relax. _It’s just Thea,_ she tells herself. _Nobody but father can hit. Thea’s not allowed._  
  
“You have been through more than is fair for your years,” Thea says. “Ylisse expects you to make decisions that take entire rooms of fully-grown adults _months_ to decide in mere weeks, even _days_ , at an age where you ought to be free to learn and explore and play. I know even before your father’s death, you were not given the chance to be truly young. It sickens me that I have only put the pieces together now, when it’s too late to do anything about it.”  
  
_Good thing I did something about it,_ Emmeryn almost says. Good thing she doesn’t.  
  
“I had intended this trip for you to learn what it’s like to be young, if only for a season,” Thea finishes. “I see now it isn’t so simple as setting down a book. You have a lot to learn.”  
  
Emmeryn straightens. “Try me,” she demands. “I’m a quick learner.”  
  
“I know you are,” Thea agrees. “Emmeryn, you are _incredibly_ intelligent— but being able to do multiplication tables, identify parts of speech, and remember the dates of important battles is not all there is to being a well-rounded person. As clever as you are, you are still a child.”  
  
“I know,” Emmeryn mumbles. She sniffs. “Still. Does being a child really mean I have to get all muddy and disgusting every day and catch frogs and such, like Charlotte? Because if so, then I think I can be a child in _other_ ways, thank you.”  
  
“The most important part of being a child is _learning_ ,” Thea says. “And having somebody to guide you through what the world outside home is like. Come— do you know how to crack an egg?”  
  
That surprises her. “No,” Emmeryn admits.  
  
“How about peeling a potato?” Thea continues. “Husking a corncob? Milking a cow?”  
  
“No,” Emmeryn admits, again. “What does that have to do with—“ it hits her mid-sentence. _It’s learning,_ she realizes. It’s having somebody to guide her through what the world outside home is like.  
  
Thea can pinpoint the exact moment realization dawns on her face. She grins. “Would you like to learn?”  
  
And in that moment something in the world shifts— suddenly being the Exalt doesn’t matter anymore because, for all she’s learned from the books that she loves, what does she know that’s beyond the walls of the castle library? There is the knowledge of thousands, _millions_ of books that can never be written down lying with every person she passes. What does Thea know that Emm hasn’t learned? What does Frederick know? Even Charlotte— what does she know that Emmeryn never got to learn? There is so much knowledge in the world that Emm once thought pointless— there is _so_ _much_ to be gained from those who can teach. How was she _ever_ satisfied with just learning from books? How had she _ever_ been happy just staying in the library rereading the tomes she could understand?  
  
Perhaps she _wasn’t_ happy. Perhaps she doesn’t yet know what true happiness feels like. It’s food for thought, at least, while she’s still working on developing her brain.  
  
So Emm nods, and Thea stands, and for the first time in her very short living memory Emmeryn feels like a child.  
  
Dinner is delicious and, Thea notes with satisfaction, Emmeryn ate a whole portion of it. She was quiet at the table and let Phila and Phobos and Charlotte carry the conversation— bright, talkative souls, all of them, even if it _did_ get a bit loud between the three— but Thea had seen what was perhaps the beginnings of a healthy glow of satisfaction in Emmeryn’s pale cheeks. Instead of looking bored and peaked as was normal for her, she seemed to be smiling to herself and letting only the smallest hint of it grace her features, like the cat that got the canary but doesn’t want anybody else to know. Thea considers this a success.  
  
Night falls on Enderwick. Charlotte is asleep in the second guest bed, covers pulled up to her chin. She has her stuffed lion under one arm and her bear under the other. The lion is Ser Pounce and the bear is Anders. Charlotte says they’re best friends but they fight a lot because Ser Pounce always wants to go out and fight criminals but Anders wants to stay at home and make cookies. Emmeryn thinks that’s reasonable— she’d rather make cookies than fight criminals, too, even though that’s kind of what an Exalt does. Except with papers and discussions instead of swords. Details.  
  
Emmeryn is still up. Her lantern flickers, but she pokes another ember into the glass and the light grows. Thea and Archimedes both told her it’d be a good idea to go to bed early because the day wouldn’t wait for her to wake, but Emmeryn just has to finish at least this chapter— her book is _A Field Guide to Garden Fairies_ and despite the fact that she knows fairies are fake and not real no matter how convincing the book makes them sound, it’s riveting.  
  
The book makes her think— what are their houses like? Do they have a mail system? Do they use butterflies and moths as mounts? How do they see at night? Hypothetically, of course. She figures that the universities would probably know if there were tiny people living in gardens.  
  
There’s a breeze outside. It’s cool and it’s probably a blessing in the warm night. There are bugs screeching outside the window and somewhere, there are owls. Something in the house creaks— someone is going down the stairs.  
  
Emmeryn puts a bookmark in her book and pushes the quilt back. She tiptoes across floorboards that creak, just a little, under her feet. After a particularly loud squawk she looks at Charlotte to see if she’s accidentally woken her— but Charlotte could sleep through an avalanche. Emm takes care not to let the hinges of the door squeak anyway.  
  
The house feels much bigger at night— perhaps because everyone who usually makes noise in it is asleep. It’s different from the castle because somebody is always up in the castle, keeping the fires going or wiping down the tables in preparation for breakfast or doing the rounds around the walls.  
  
Emmeryn’s heart jumps into her throat when the ladder-stairway to the attic creaks and something silvery in the dim light appears on it— she flattens herself to a wall but then she realizes it’s just Phila, and Phila’s just as startled.  
  
“Hey,” she whispers. “Sorry, did I wake you? Uh— you want me to call you your Grace, right?”  
  
“Hay is for horses,” Emm whispers back. “And Emmeryn is fine. I’m sorry I snapped at you.”  
  
“I’m sorry I tossed the fish at you,” Phila replies. “I didn’t realize you hated being outside so much.”  
  
“It’s not my favorite thing,” Emm admits. “I have weak lungs so I can’t run and I have bad hay fever, and I can’t get any work done outside anyway.”  
  
“Is that all you do?” Phila asks. “Working?”  
  
“I have to keep all of Ylisse running smoothly,” Emm shrugs. “Reparations are still far from being done. It’s just that I stop knowing what to do when the only actual work to be done is signing off on reports and supply manifests and that’s mostly Ser Arno’s job.”  
  
“So you took a vacation to a farm, surrounded by outdoors— which you hate,” Phila sums up.  
  
Emm makes a face. “It wasn’t my idea. Your mother insisted.”  
  
“Ah.” Somehow that answers all of Phila’s questions. “Hey, do you want to come catch fireflies with me?”  
  
Now that catches her off-guard. Emm blinks. “What?”  
  
Phila grins. Her teeth are crooked and bright in the blue moonlight coming in from the window opposite the stairs. “Come on. It won’t take long, promise.”  
  
Phila leads her outside. The night is still hot even though it’s not quite summer yet— it’s on the precipice, where spring bleeds into summer and it’s not quite as hot as it could be. Daten Lake makes Ylisstol bearable in the summer, and there are plenty of wells for cool water, and many an opportunistic mage makes quite a bit by freezing fruit with ice magic and enchanting ice so it won’t ever melt. Frozen strawberries are Emm’s favorite, though she hasn’t had them since the war began.  
  
The stars are out. Emmeryn has never seen quite so many stars.  
  
For a moment she stands there, breathless, the warm breeze rustling her skirt and the grass below her feet. Her curls are in her face and, idly, she pulls them out of her mouth. But the sky is still there, with a big crescent-shaped moon and stars, so many stars, so many that it almost seems like all the light in the world has moved into the sky. Perhaps today is a day of revelations for her— just as she’s never considered the world of knowledge outside her door, so too has she never really looked at the sky.  
  
In Ylisstol there are always lights, but coming from the city— either that or the sky is merely inky blackness, covered in clouds with perhaps a few stars here and there. How has she lived without knowing this was what lay beyond? And even so, what lies beyond those stars? Are there more she can’t see? What do the patterns in them say? Do they follow the moon and sun? Who puts them out at dawn and who puts them up at night? In that moment, Emmeryn feels very young and very small— but for once, being young and small is not a bad thing. There is no father with his silent glares of disapproval and his lectures and his big sword hand, and there is no mother with her cowardice telling Emmeryn to do what she herself cannot. There is no war. There is no hunger in Ylisstol. There is no Ylissean blood staining blades, no Ylissean bodies in mass graves, no Ylissean people cursing the Grace name because the people they loved left to good people following bad orders.  
  
“Hey, star-eyes,” Phila calls, and it’s a teasing nickname but Emmeryn knows she’s only teasing (the look in her eyes is of genuine laughter, and it is now, when Phila has walked into the waving grass of the back pasture in a cotton nightshirt with the sleeves ripped off with a glass jar in her hand that Emmeryn thinks she never wants to leave), “Watch this— but stay _real_ still. The fireflies will fly away if we make too much noise.”  
  
You look like starlight, Emmeryn thinks, and does not say. (She will, later. There is time yet.) Instead she nods, and keeps her mouth shut.  
  
Phila crouches, the jar and lid prepared. And then the fireflies come out— amidst the buzzing of other insects, they light up. The night has not cooled yet and it’s still humid from the daytime. And then it looks like the stars have come down to the ground, and again it steals Emmeryn’s breath right from her lungs. This, what she feels, can only be described as pure and undiluted wonder. She doubts she will be the same person tomorrow as she was yesterday.  
  
Phila catches five. The jar has a bit of fresh grass and a slice of apple. Her grin wide and brilliant in the starlight, she brings the jar to Emmeryn.  
  
“Look,” she says. Emmeryn stares, unable to remember how to speak. Phila has captured the night sky in a mason jar.  
  
“Wow,” Emmeryn breathes.  
  
“I guess you wouldn’t have fireflies in the city,” Phila admits. “Ah, well. Means it was a good memory seein’ ‘em now! Ma says it’s healthy to see new things. I guess that’s why she brought you an’ Charlie out here.”  
  
“Charlie?” Emmeryn questions.  
  
“The tiddlywink,” Phila clarifies, putting her hand at Charlotte’s height. “Yay big, doofy ears, little ponytail on the side of her head? That one.”  
  
“That’s Charlotte,” Emm corrects. “My little sister.”  
  
“I figured, though you’re not too alike,” Phila shrugs. “You’ve got the same ears, though.”  
  
Emmeryn idly touches one of her ears. They _are_ a little big for her head.

“Why do you call her that?” Emmeryn asks. “That’s not her name. Charlie is a boy’s name.”  
  
Phila shrugs. “She seemed to like it,” is all she says. “And anyway, it’s her name, so I think if someone’s gonna tell me what to call her, it’d best be her.” Which is fair enough so Emmeryn doesn’t press the matter further.  
  
“My ma’s real smart,” Phila says, sitting on the back porch steps with Emmeryn as they watch the fireflies in the jar. “She has a way of knowing when folks are having a tough time. She was the town doctor before the war. I don’t remember much ‘cause I was real young when she left with the Crusader’s army, but folks keep asking me and Phobos if we’re gonna follow in her footsteps.”  
  
“Are you?” Emmeryn asks.  
  
Phila scoffs. “Nah,” she says. “I don’t got enough magic to be any good at doctoring. Phobos, though— one time I got a whole cabal of fishhooks in my hand and he got them out lickedy-split. Barely even hurt! ‘Course he’s the boy so people guess he’s gonna go into fighting and stuff. Even though that’s gonna be me.”  
  
“The Ylissean army is in need of more soldiers, and doctors,” Emmeryn says. “If your parents are alright with it, you can always enlist when you’re old enough.”  
  
“The army?” Phila repeats. She chuckles. “Well, sure, that’s what I’ll do— but, hey, you wanna hear a secret?” Her scarlet eyes glimmer with starlight. There’s laughter and kindness in them and Emmeryn thinks she must be full of love, all the time, for everything to have eyes like that. Thea and Archimedes named her well— Phila Gale, full of love and free as the wind.  
  
Emmeryn is a little bit scared of Phila Gale.  
  
“Sure,” she says anyway. This is the kind of thing friends do. Phila scoots a little closer, and Emm does, too. They’re touching now. Phila radiates warmth like a furnace but somehow even in the summer night she’s comforting and not stifling.  
  
“I want to reform the Pegasus Knights,” Phila says, eyes shining. “You know— the heroic sisterhood from a billion years ago? My father told me stories of them growing up— my great-grandmother was one, I think— and that’s the kind of army I want to fight in. Up in the sky on brilliant wings, protecting the people and the crown? That’s the life for me.” She sighs dreamily, looking up at the stars and the moon like she’s picturing herself on the back of a magnificent winged horse, silver armor shining, lance glistening and sharp and made of wind and stars. Emmeryn can picture it. If anybody can revive a long-dead order, it’s Phila.  
  
“The Pegasus Knights are the traditional bodyguards of the Exalt,” she says. “So if you do reform the Sisterhood, and if you become it’s Knight-Commander, then if I were going to be traditional I’d appoint you my second bodyguard. Frederick is my first, of course. It’ll hurt his feelings if I have anybody else once he finishes his training.”  
  
“Of course,” Phila agrees. “You know— I think I’d be glad to do that. If any Exalt’s worth protecting, I think it’d be you. Ma says you’re what Ylisse needed, and if I’m protecting her, I’d best protect you, too.”  
  
“I’ll hold you to that oath,” Emmeryn says.  
  
Phila laughs— it scares away the fireflies, but the ones in the jar are still there. “You’re not so bad, star-eyes,” she decides.  
  
“My name is Emmeryn,” Emm tells her, but truth be told, star-eyes is far from the worst nickname one could come up with.  
  
“And mine is Phila, but why limit yourself?” Phila shrugs. “Plenty of room for proper names elsewhere.” There’s truth to that.  
  
“Alright,” Emmeryn caves. “Call me what you will— as long as it’s not silly, or insulting, or both.”  
  
Phila chuckles. “Deal,” she decides. “So, star-eyes— do you want to do the honors?”  
  
She offers Emmeryn the jar. Hesitantly, Emm takes it. Phila nods, and she pops open the lid. The fireflies fly out into the night. It makes Emmeryn feel small, but for once, being small does not mean being lonely.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i don't even know how to catch fireflies, but wikihow says this is the right way to do it


	4. Greenbark Adventurers

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“Guess bein’ Exalt means you can’t be fun,” Charlie admits. “Sounds dumb. How come papa an’ mama had to get dead, huh? Just ‘cause they did means Emm has to do papa’s job an’ she can’t play with me anymore. I bet if papa an’ mama were still alive, Emmy would’ve come with us an’ she could’ve set Sully straight when he said I was a baby an’ a coward. She could’ve found the dumb bushes no problem, an’ then we all wouldn’t have gotten lost.”_
> 
> _The crows squawk and peck at the chunks of bread Charlie had scattered as Ser Pounce takes her through the forest. Hi, crows, Charlie thinks, giving a little wave. Phobos had said it was always best to be nice to the crows, because they never forget a face and you never knew how many might be witches in disguise._
> 
> Be kind to the crows.

_“I’m goin’ down to riv-er Morr-i-gan—“_  
  
_“Where sunlight grows just like hearthspriggan—“_  
  
_“Down to riv-er Morr-i-gan—“_  
  
_“And I’m com-in’ home for sup-per!“_  
  
_“I’m goin’ down to riv-er Morr-i-gan—“_  
  
_“Where fish jump high and get to diggin’—“_  
  
_“Down to riv-er Morr-i-gan—“_  
  
_“And I’ll be back to-mor-row mor-ning!”_  
  
And on and on the song goes, describing various things that happened on the river Morrigan (that made very little sense— fish don’t dig) and when the singer would be back— though with every passing verse, the time the singer would be back got further and further away. Phila and Phobos bounce the lines between them, both their voices hearty and strong, leading the way along the path to the river. Frederick carries the bait bucket, his shortsword (it makes him feel better) and the basket of lunches. Charlotte skips between the twins, Ser Pounce the stuffed lion dangling by a paw from Charlotte’s little hand. He’s kind of shabby at this point. Emmeryn can have a real toy lion made, with a horsehair mane and shiny button eyes and a plush coat, but at that point it’d be too nice to play with. Emmeryn may be old before she learned to be young, but even she understands that if toys are too fancy then they aren’t fun anymore. Fine, intricate toys always reeked of an adult fishing for gratitude— even the toys themselves somehow felt snobbish and pompous and like they were too good to be played with. Being the eldest princess and the heir, Emmeryn had gotten many, many gifts of fancy toys given to her in attempts to win her father’s favor. She’d always smiled politely and said thank you like her teachers said nice young ladies do, and then put them in the cabinet in her room and never touched them again. Even if Charlie is only five and doesn’t care what it was she plays with, a fancy toy would be insincere.  
  
“Oh, we’re getting close!” Phila says suddenly, breaking off from her made-up verses of the song (the singer was going to be back in twelve seasons) and snapping Emmeryn from her train of thought. “Look, there are the crows! Hi, crows!” She waved at the crows sitting on willow trees. The crows caw— probably more at each other than at Phila.  
  
“Hi, crows!” Charlie repeats, waving at the crows with her tiny hand. She tucks Ser Pounce into her elbow and waves with both hands, for emphasis.  
  
“Are there always crows on the river?” Emmeryn asks.  
  
“Well, yeah,” Phobos shrugs.  
  
“That’s why they call it the river Morrigan,” Phila adds. “There’s a legend about it—“  
  
“A coven of witches that turned into crows during the day used to live here,” Phobos says, wiggling his fingers for effect. “That’s why you’d best be nice to them. They don’t forget faces, you know.”  
  
“They say the mother-witch was three times as big as the others!” Phila continues.  
  
“This was way back when the world was young, you understand,” Phobos explains. “So nobody had thought up witch hunts.”  
  
“The mother-witch used to steal little girls from the villages,” Phila says. “And sometimes they’d be found years later with black feathers in their hair and ash on their cheeks, talking about a village of birds and fae hidden deep in the forest north of Ansburg.”  
  
Emmeryn’s eyes go wide. “Whoa,” she breathes.  
  
Phila grins mischievously. “Nobody says so anymore, but anyone who’s anyone still stays away from the depths of Greenbark forest. Plus it’s _probably_ also haunted with the souls of foolish people who went looking for their lost family members and died trying.”  
  
“A forest can’t be full of fae and and witches _and_ haunted at the same time,” Frederick protests. “That’s ridiculous.”  
  
“You say so, but just wait ’til you see it for yourself,” Phobos says mysteriously. “I bet they’ll turn you into a bear— and then they’ll all grow teeth and hunt you down, tearing away at your meat little bit by little bit! Fae and witches _love_ fresh meat.”  
  
“That’s—“ Frederick swallows. “Don’t be foolish. You’re scaring Charlotte.”  
  
“I’m not scared of nothin’,” Charlie protests, Ser Pounce swinging from her hand. “I wanna go see the fae an’ the witches! I wanna be a bird!”  
  
Phobos cackles. He turns and walks backwards, one hand in the pocket of his trousers and the other holding the fishing pole on his shoulder. “Just you wait, Freddy,” he says. “They’ll get you. They always go for the nonbelievers.”  
  
Frederick glowers. Behind him, Phila grins and suddenly pokes him in the sides— he shrieks and jumps aside, dropping the bait bucket and putting a hand on his sword. When he realizes it’s just Phila, cackling like a maniac, he scowls.  
  
“You’re _not_ funny,” he says. “Both of you. You think you’re hilarious but you’re not.”  
  
“I got you!” Phila says proudly. “Oh, boy, did you hear that screech?”  
  
“Coulda broken a window,” Phobos agrees. “Best be careful, Freddy— the mother-witch might think you’re a little girl and steal you away!”  
  
Frederick’s cheeks are red in embarrassment. “I hate you both,” he grumbles.  
  
“That’s why you don’t make light of fairies,” Phobos says wisely. “You never know what’s going to happen. Maybe you’ll wake up tomorrow with worms for fingers.”  
  
Frederick makes a disgusted face, but Charlie finds this very funny. She giggles and shrieks in delight, and claps her little hands together. “Finger worms!” she repeats. “Gross!”  
  
Frederick scowls. He falls back to walk by Emmeryn’s side. “I don’t know why I even associate with them,” he grumbles.  
  
“They’re not so bad,” Emmeryn admits. “And you associated with them before, didn’t you?”  
  
“Yes, when we were _seven_ ,” Frederick retorts. “And it wasn’t even my idea.”  
  
“Did you have any other friends?” Emmeryn asks. Frederick chooses not to answer that, so Emmeryn assumes the answer is no.  
  
They arrived at the Gale twins’ favorite fishing spot shortly after that. Frederick set down the bait bucket and the basket of lunches on the little pier over the river. Charlie immediately runs out onto the pier, crouching on the edge and looking into the water.  
  
“Charlotte, step back from there,” Emm calls. “You’ll fall.”  
  
“I’ll be careful,” Charlie insists.  
  
“If you’re being careful, then you should step back off the pier,” Emm replies. “I don’t want to have to fish you out of the river two miles down and haul you back to Thea’s house because you went too close to the edge of the pier and fell in.”  
  
“It’s a big river,” Phila adds. “They fish dead bodies out of it every day.”  
  
Charlie’s eyes widen. “Can I see?”  
  
“Well, they have to use cannons to get them out,” Phobos explains. “‘Cause dead bodies sink in the current, right? And we don’t have a cannon, so.”  
  
Charlie frowns. “Aww.” Emmeryn has no idea if what Phobos said is true or not, but it makes Charlie move back from the edge of the pier and sit down on the bank. It’s a stretch of sand and gravel that stretches along the length of the river that Emm can see, on both sides. Emmeryn is told this isn’t the widest of the river’s tributaries, but it’s still far too wide and deep to swim. Emm, who is only here because it’d be boring to sit in the house and do nothing and because Thea was dropping hints she ought to get a little fresh air, sits down under a tree and sets her woven straw hat aside. At least it’s a nice day, Emmeryn will admit. It’s not terribly hot, even if there are bugs.  
  
Phila sits down on the pier. “Hey, Phobos,” she says to her twin, “Bet I can catch the biggest fish.”  
  
“No way,” Phobos replies. “Bet I can. Five sovereigns.”  
  
“Ten,” Phila challenges.  
  
“You don’t _have_ ten sovereigns,” Phobos protests.  
  
“That _you_ know about,” Phila retorts. “So you’ll see to it?”  
  
“Seven,” Phobos decides. “And loser gives up dessert— for a week.”  
  
Phila likes the sound of that— the excitement of the stakes rather than the prospect of losing. Emmeryn has never understood the appeal of gambling. She can get all the excitement she needs from reading over court cases. While the two of them chatter while waiting for the fish to bite (they’re going to need a lot of them), Emmeryn opens her book again.  
  
Frederick tries to teach Charlie how to fish by tying the line around a jam jar and waiting for minnows to nibble. She gets into it enough that Frederick can just watch her crouching on the bank with Ser Pounce on the gravel beside her, face furrowed in concentration, and she catches three tiddlers— which she announces proudly to everyone when lunchtime comes. Phila and Phobos toss their fish into the bucket and Phobos hangs a chilling charm on the bucket to keep them cold. There are sandwiches and a flask of sweet fruit juice that they share, and strips of dried meat that are too tough for Charlie’s baby teeth to bite through so she yanks at it like a dog with a rope and does not succeed until Emmeryn cuts the dried meat into smaller pieces with her knife.  
  
Charlie is bored with fishing by this point, so when Frederick is packing up the lunch leftovers, Charlie announces she’s going on an adventure. Emm says, nose still buried in her book, to be careful not to get lost because Emm probably doesn’t think Charlie is going anywhere further than five minutes away, but that’s wrong— Charlie is going on a real adventure, with Ser Pounce as her sidekick!  
  
She leaves the fishing spot with purpose and Ser Pounce dangling from her hand. It’s much bigger when she’s not surrounded by bigger people— to her, Frederick and the twins and even Emmeryn are titans who could shake the ground when they walk if they wanted to, tall and strong as trees. And although Phobos and Phila are fun and talk about stories like they’re real, Charlie knows they don’t see things the way she does— they think they _are_ just stories, that fae and witches and hauntings are made-up but fun to joke about and scare their friends with. Charlie knows better.  
  
Thinking about that sends a shiver up her spine. She stops in her tracks.  
  
“Ser Pounce, the fae an’ witches an’ ghosts won’t really steal me, will they?” she asks, looking at Ser Pounce.  
  
_“‘If they do,’”_ Ser Pounce replies. _“‘Then Emm will be upset. I can roar away the darkness, but I don’t think I’m strong enough alone to roar away the witches. Maybe ask them nicely?’”_ Which makes sense because Emm always says asking nicely is the first step.  
  
It’s worth a shot. She takes a breath. “Um,” she says to the forest, gripping Ser Pounce. “Hello, fae an’ witches an’ ghosts? I think you’re all real amazing an’ stuff, but I can’t play with you now ‘cause my big sister will be mad if I get lost an’ come back late. So please don’t try an’ take me anywhere unless I can be back ‘fore sunset. Okay?”  
  
The forest does not reply.  
  
“Okay,” Charlie decides, nodding firmly. “Thank you. That was a good idea, Ser Pounce.”  
  
_“‘I’m full of them,’”_ Ser Pounce replies.  
  
That makes her feel a bit better. Confident that nothing in the forest is going to try and steal her or turn her into a bird, Charlie moves on with her journey through the forest, stepping over roots and stray branches. Birds chirp and cicadas whirr in the summer heat. Charlie can still hear the river, but it’s quieter, muffled through the undergrowth. She climbs up and hops over a log covered in green moss with little mushrooms dotting its surface, and wipes the dirt from her hands on the skirt of her dress. It’s sky-blue and matches the one Emmeryn has— Charlie liked it so much that Thea made her one to match, with nice big pockets. Right now she’s keeping a few nice round rocks in one and a half-sandwich wrapped in brown paper in the other— in case she gets hungry on her journey.  
  
But right now the only thing Charlie hungers for is adventure, and thus far she’s not impressed. Supposedly this is how all storybook heroes start out— except they usually have a weapon of some kind to vanquish darkness and Emm made Charlie leave her sword at the house because she’d throw a fit if it accidentally fell into the river and Emm has the foresight to avoid this. Charlie thinks Emm is a _big dumb meanie_ for it because she would not let her sword fall into the river because she’s not a baby anymore, thank you very much, but it’s not like she can go back to the house and get it now. She supposes it’s better that Anders the bear is watching over it, and baking cookies. He likes that.  
  
She spots a nice-looking stick sitting on the ground and picks it up. It’s somewhat crooked and there are a lot of extra twigs, but it’s the right size and weight to be her temporary blade. She plucks off the extra twigs with her short, grimy fingers. It’ll do. She’ll name it _Lightblade of Darkness-Slaying,_ because it’s a blade made of light that slays darkness. It’s a pretty easy name once you get used to it.  
  
“Every hero needs a sword,” she says to Ser Pounce. “It’s too bad I left mine at Thea’s house.”  
  
_“‘Heroes have lots of different weapons,’”_ Ser Pounce says. _“‘My roar isn’t my only weapon. Sometimes I use my mighty claws, or my ferocious teeth. Just because Blueblade isn’t here doesn’t mean you can’t be a warrior.’”_  
  
“That’s true,” Charlotte admits. She’s very glad Ser Pounce is so smart.  
  
With Lightblade in her hand and a spirit of adventure burning in her gut, she sets off with renewed vigor— she’d find something amazing today, she’s sure! Even if she’s not sure what she’ll find, or where she’ll go, she’ll bring back something fantastic.  
  
The journey through the woods starts off with promise. Eventually the sun scorches even through the shade of the forest midway through its trek back down to the ground. She finds a lovely turtle in a creek and gets her dress and shoes muddy trying to catch it, and she almost succeeds but doesn’t because she turns away for a second and it hid where she couldn’t find it. She takes a break while sitting on a pile of rocks and daydreams about being a dashing hero come to save the village from the vile beasts. Then all the other children would want to go on adventures with her and play with her all the time, so she’d always have somebody to play with even if Emm didn’t have any time to play anymore. Who needs Emm when Charlie has a hundred other friends?  
  
It’s highly unlikely, but it’s a nice thought. Charlie moves on with her journey, venturing further and further into the forest until she cannot hear the river at all, nor could she find her way back to it if she tried. There is so much forest, and Charlie is so small— she feels like if she steps in the wrong shadow, she’ll get swallowed by the trees and never get back to Ylisstol again. And then when she did, ten years later, Emm would say _what did I tell you, Charlotte— I told you not to wander too far and you did and got lost so we had to go back to Ylisstol without you._ Worse than that, what if Emm didn’t even remember she had another sister other than baby Lissa? What if she came back to Ylisstol and the Exalted Council demanded to know what her business was and if she had an appointment to see the Exalt and Charlie would try to say that she’s the second Grace sister that’s been lost in the woods for ten years but they wouldn’t believe her because the witches in the forest turned her into a crow?  
  
All of this is, of course, anywhere from unlikely to impossible, but Charlie is five and it seems like fact to her. Because that’s what you think when you’re five and get lost in the woods— obviously she’s going to be turned into a crow and forgotten by her family because magic exists and that’s how families work.  
  
(This isn’t to say that magic isn’t real— magic very much is real, and there are almost certainly spells that could turn living things into other living things. But the students of such a discipline of magic aren’t bird-witches living deep inside of forests and consorting with fae and snatching wandering children for assimilation, no— most of them are in Plegia, and they don’t kidnap anybody who doesn’t walk up to their laboratory door and ask to join, thank you very much. Not that that isn’t just as foreign and occult as witches in woods to Charlie, whose only real experiences with magic in her short life are fairy stories, Emmeryn’s textbooks, and the boy that keeps the torches in the castle lit all day and night.)  
  
“I don’t wanna be a crow,” Charlie whimpers to Ser Pounce, her lower lip trembling. She clutches Lightblade tighter in her meaty little hands, Ser Pounce tucked in the crook of her arm. (The blade shimmers with a glowing blue light, and even if it’s only in Charlie’s imagination, watching the light shine from the finely-honed steel makes her feel a little bit stronger. She decides there’s a red ribbon wrapped around the hilt to make it prettier, because a sword can’t vanquish darkness if it’s boring and unadorned.)  
  
_“‘I’ll roar the darkness away,’”_ Ser Pounce growls. _“‘ROAR!’”_ But nothing happens. The darkness remains, and Charlie shivers. Ser Pounce growls again, his claws and teeth at the ready.  
  
What does Emm say about being brave? That it’s something inside or something? Charlie isn’t sure if she believes that.  
  
“Ser Pounce,” she whimpers, hands shaking. “I’m scared.”  
  
_“‘That’s what the shadows feed off of,’”_ Ser Pounce says. _“‘Don’t be scared, Charlie! I’m here, too!’”_  
  
And he’s right. (Ser Pounce is always right.) Charlie sniffles, straightening her shoulders. “I’m not scared of nothin’,” she says to the shadows, pointing Lightblade in that direction. (The creatures in the shadows hiss at the power of her Lightblade, not daring to take its wielder no matter how small and scared she looks.) “Not the dark, not monsters, not witches, not nothin’! I’m a legendary hero of— um— legend, chosen by the sacred blade of light, the Lightblade of Darkness-Slaying! So there!”  
  
Charlie stamps her foot for emphasis. (The shadows retreat further, glaring but they will not harm her so long as the Lightblade is in her hands.) Satisfied, Charlotte sheaths her blade with a shink sound she has to make with her mouth for the full effect, and continues on her journey with renewed bravery. Ser Pounce is proud.  
  
Eventually the forest ends, and she comes across a big bridge across the River Morrigan on the road to Ansburg. The signpost, which is three times Charlotte’s height, says _Ansburg, 30 mins. Ylisstol, 1 day. Feroxi Longfort, 1 week. Greenbark Forest, 10 mins. Enderwick, 45 mins. Fort Beauregard, 3 1/2 days. Morrigan Garrison, 1 hrs._ Presumably the distance is by foot. Emm was saying something a while back about paving over all the roads in the country to allow for smoother travel, but Charlie wasn’t really listening.  
  
Charlie frowns. “Ser Pounce, where do we go next?” she asks.  
  
_“‘I don’t know,’”_ Ser Pounce says. _“‘I’m a lion. I can’t read.’”_  
  
That’s unhelpful. Charlie scowls. “How are you even a warrior-adventurer-hero if you can’t read?” she demands. “You have to read signs and maps!”  
  
_“‘Signs and maps in Lionland are all in pictures!’”_ Ser Pounce protests. _“‘Animals can’t read, Charlie! You know that! I especially cannot because my eyes are buttons.’”_  
  
Charlie scowls. “You’re no help,” she says. Ser Pounce quiets— perhaps because there’s someone approaching.  
  
She turns, clutching Lightblade and Ser Pounce a little tighter. It looks like two boys, one with red hair and one with greenish-brown. The one with red hair is shorter and stouter, but still probably taller than Charlie. He’s carrying a stick he probably found on the ground that’s twice his height. The other seems much calmer.  
  
“Hey!” the red one yells, waving. “Hey! You!”  
  
“My big sister says hay is for horses,” Charlie yells back.  
  
“Good, horses are cool,” the red one yells in response. He and his friend approach and Charlie can see they’re both taller than she is, and the green one has a slingshot stuck in his belt and half an apple in his hand. He takes a bite of it with a crunch of his crooked teeth.  
  
“Hey,” the red one says again. “Are you lost?”  
  
“I’m not lost, I know exactly where I am,” Charlie protests.  
  
Red folds his arms. “Oh, yeah? Where are you?”  
  
“I’m at the signpost,” Charlie says matter-of-factly. “An’ that’s the River Morrigan. An’ I’m a half-hour from Ansburg an’ forty-five minutes from Enderwick, an’ a day from Ylisstol.”  
  
Red squints. But she’s not wrong, so he accepts this. “I guess,” he admits. “Still. You’re not from ‘round here, are you?”  
  
“No,” Charlie says. “I’m from Ylisstol. I’m Charlie, Charlie Grace.”  
  
“I’m Sully, Sully Rhoddens,” Red replies. “Me an’ Stahl are from Ansburg. We’re goin’ to Greenbark Forest!” Stahl nods in agreement, freckly cheeks full of apple.  
  
Charlie frowns. “But— isn’t it full of fae an’ witches an’ ghosts?”  
  
Sully waves a hand. “Yeah, but that’s okay ‘cause we’re only goin’ for a bit. The blueberries that grow in Greenbark Forest are the best, an’ we’re gonna pick a whole ton of ‘em!”  
  
“But what if you get snatched and— an’ turned into a bird?” Charlie says, shivering and clutching Ser Pounce tighter.  
  
“Only girls get turned into bird-witches,” Sully scoffs. “And we’re not girls, so we’ll be okay.”  
  
Charlie can’t argue with that logic. “My friend Phobos said that they’ll turn boys into bears,” she says carefully. “An’ then go on a big hunt an’ pick out all their meat with their sharp beaks ‘cause having prey that stays still is no fun. They’ll let you loose in the forest an’ just when you think you’re safe, boom, there they are! An’ they’ll eat you in little bitty bit by little bitty bit, ’til you can’t run nowhere anymore ‘cause all your meat is gone.” She shivers.  
  
Stahl and Sully exchange glances.  
  
“Maybe she’s right,” Stahl admits. “I heard about that. One of my cousins knew a guy that escaped from it. They found him in the forest all bleeding an’ he said he was attacked by a swarm of birds!” Charlie nods for emphasis.  
  
Sully groans. “Ugh, that’s just a dumb story,” he says. “Birds attacked him ‘cause he tried to pinch eggs from a nest.”  
  
“Maybe that’s what the witches want you to think,” Stahl replies. “I dunno, Sully. I think we should pick berries somewhere else.”  
  
Sully puffs out his cheeks. “What are you, a coward?” he demands. “Men don’t shy away from a few stupid birds!”  
  
“Sully, there’s a line between bein’ manly an’ bein’ stupid,” Stahl says wisely. “I know you like jumpin’ across that line like a frog playin’ hop-squares, but I’m with the city girl on this one.” Charlie nods empathetically.  
  
Sully narrows his eyes. “What are you, chicken?”  
  
“I’m not a chicken,” Charlie says, puzzled. “I’m Charlie.”  
  
“Charlie the chicken!” Sully taunts. He makes exaggerated clucking noises when Charlie tries to open her mouth. Charlie gets the impression that being chicken is a bad thing, the way Sully laughs about it— she narrows her eyes.  
  
“I am not a chicken!” Charlie protests.  
  
Stahl sighs. “Don’t let him rile you up,” he advises.  
  
“But I’m not a chicken!” Charlie repeats. “I’m a hero of legend! I gotta sword an’ a lion sidekick an’ everything!”  
  
“Prove it,” Sully challenges. “Let’s all go to Greenbark Forest an’ we’ll see who gets pecked apart by crows. Here’s an answer: it won’t be nobody, ‘cuz the stories are just baby stories that parents tell to keep kids in line!”  
  
So Sully leads the way. “My parents didn’t tell me nothin’ about witches or stuff,” Charlie volunteers. “Papa told me stories ‘bout the war but not ‘cause anything would eat me if I left the city.”  
  
“All parents tell their kids stories,” Stahl shrugs. “My dad told me that the sun moves ‘cause two of my brothers got in such big trouble they were condemned to push it for all eternity.”  
  
“My dad told me the same thing, ‘cept it was his brother,” Sully adds. “They’ve all got things to tell kids about the bad things that’ll happen if you’re bad. Like the one about Father Wintertide.”  
  
“Oh, I know him!” Charlie brightens at this. “He brings presents!”  
  
“Only for the good kids,” Stahl says. “For the bad kids, he doesn’t bring nothin’. Then he shoves ‘em in his bag and they go to way-far-away-up-north where they mine coal until they’re seventeen!”  
  
“Nuh-uh,” Charlie protests. “My big sister told me Father Wintertide loves all children.”  
  
“Just ‘cause he loves ‘em doesn’t mean they’re not bad,” Sully replies. “What, do you believe everything your big sister says?”  
  
“She’s real smart,” Charlie says. “So, yeah. She’s ten an’ a half an’ she knows everything, I think.”  
  
Sully scoffs. “Only babies listen to everything big kids say.”  
  
“I’m not a baby!” Charlie protests. “I’m goin’ on six!” Even though she _just_ turned five last month.  
  
“An’ I’m goin’ on seven, but that doesn’t matter,” Sully replies. “You can still be a baby however old you get.”  
  
“I’m not a baby,” Charlie mutters. She frowns. Sully shrugs. They keep going.  
  
They reach the forest in short order. Charlie holds Ser Pounce a little tighter and hesitates by the entry sign, but Sully marches in like she owns the place.  
  
“Come on,” she calls. “Or are you still chicken?”  
  
“I’m not a chicken, an’ I’m not a baby, neither!” Charlie insists.  
  
“Then prove it,” Sully calls.  
  
Charlie will not take this offense. She tries to puff up like she’s seen Emmeryn do when somebody underestimates her, but probably just ends up looking silly. She balls up her fists and marches past Sully into the woods, and she only hesitates a little when the darkness starts creeping. She points Lightblade at the shadows and, to her relief, they seem to shrink.  
  
“Cool stick,” Stahl comments.  
  
“It’s Lightblade, blade of light an’ darkness-slaying,” Charlie says proudly. “It’s blessed by the gods an’ only I can wield it to its true potential ‘cause I’m the legendary legend hero.”  
  
“Wow,” Sully snorts.  
  
“It’s true!” Charlie insists. “See, even got a birthmark to prove it. My sister’s got one just like it an’ it means we’re special. See!” She pushes up her left sleeve to show off the Brand on her shoulder. The color drains from Stahl’s face by several degrees when he sees it. Even Sully is caught off-guard.  
  
“That’s the _princess_ of _Ylisse_ , Sully,” Stahl hisses, where Charlie can’t hear. “You’ve been calling the _princess_ of _Ylisse_ a chicken!”  
  
“What’s _she_ gonna do, behead me?” Sully hisses back. “She’s a little kid!”  
  
“I don’t know, I don’t—“ Stahl sighs. He steals a glance back at Charlie, humming a song to herself with her stuffed lion in one arm and her stick in the other hand, poking at rocks and occasionally glaring at the shadows.  
  
“Just— maybe lay off with the teasing,” he suggests. Sully rolls his eyes. “Look, I don’t want her to tell her dad— the _Exalt_ — and have our families tossed in prison or whatever, okay?”  
  
“Fine, whatever,” Sully scoffs. “But no royals matter out here, s’what my dad says. Ansburg’s too far away to matter nothin’ to the crown.” Sully’s father may be minor nobility, but he has never kept his distrust for the crown a secret. And Stahl will admit that’s true— though he’s six and a half, so what does he know? Still, he falls back in step next to Charlie.  
  
“Pretty cool lion,” he comments.  
  
“He’s Ser Pounce,” Charlie says matter-of-factly. “He’s a warrior who likes to fight evil and his best friend is a bear named Anders. They’re best friends but they argue a lot. Anders likes to stay home and bake cookies. He doesn’t use a lot of honey in his cookies even though he’s a bear because he doesn’t like to bother the bees…” And on and on she goes, with Stahl listening intently and nodding. Sully rolls his eyes and continues leading the way, planting his walking stick on the ground every step.  
  
Greenbark Forest grows darker as they venture further in— eventually the dirt road they’d been following becomes little more than a little-taken path of trampled grass and leaves. Charlie clutches Ser Pounce a bit tighter, nervously glancing at the shadows. Wind whistles through the trees and birds chirp and twitter and make noise in the summer air. They’re shaded by the canopy of the forest, climbing over fallen logs dotted with sunshine dappled through the leaves. It’s the afternoon, but summer days are long so there are still several hours until it gets dark.  
  
At a moss-covered sign, they stop. Just beyond, there’s a fallen-in cabin covered in fallen leaves and ivy and moss, its roof half-caved and its windows boarded up with rotting boards. There’s a tattered red cape tied around a rusty halberd sticking from the chimney. There’s a board nailed over the door with “NO GIRLS ALOWD” crudely carved into the wood.  
  
Stahl smacks Sully’s shoulder. “We took a wrong turn,” he says. “This is the old clubhouse. The blackberry bushes are by the stone arch.”  
  
“Well, you lead the way next time instead of chattin’ it up with a ba—“ Sully cuts himself off. “Uh, a young lady. You’ve got better directions than I do anyway.”  
  
Stahl sighs. “Well, there are bushes around here anyway,” he says. “Let’s just pick here and head back instead of trying to get to the stone arch.”  
  
Sully scoffs. “No way!” he insists. “We came out here to pick the berries by the stone arch, so let’s by the gods do it!”  
  
“We’ll never make it back home before dark if we do that,” Stahl argues.  
  
“Coward,” Sully grumbles. “You’re just scared of the dark.”  
  
Stahl flushes at the offense. “Am not!” he protests. “I just— Charlie looks scared, so maybe we should take her home first.”  
  
“I’m not scared of nothin’,” Charlie insists, though her knees are trembling. “I just, um— my sister’s gonna be mad if I’m late.”  
  
Sully rolls his eyes. “Cowards an’ chickens, the both of you,” he says. “Whatever. You take the pipsqueak back, and I’ll pick the berries from the good bushes _by myself_.”  
  
He marches off. Stahl and Charlie exchange glances, then follow.

* * *

  
  
Back at the river, Phila tosses the final fish into the fishing bucket. Phobos crouches to inspect their haul, his fishing pole over his shoulder. The sun has just begun to set and turn the sky yellow and gold. Emmeryn has managed to ignore the prickling and the bugs and fallen asleep with her head on Frederick’s leg, leaving Frederick pinned into place. Emmeryn is less than five feet tall and would blow away in a stiff wind— how can someone so small be so powerful?  
  
“We ought to get back home,” Phila decides, stretching. “We’ve got plenty of fish! Smoked fish for dinner, fish sandwiches for lunch, fish pies for dinner tomorrow— we could even have salted fish as a snack whenever we want!”  
  
“And dad gets the bones for his experiments,” Phobos add. The two bump fists, hard enough Frederick is sure they’ll both bruise, but the Gale twins are very tough kids and don’t even flinch. “Nudge her Grace awake, will you, Freddy? Phila an’ I can carry the stuff back.”  
  
“She doesn’t sleep enough,” Frederick sighs. But he’s sure she wouldn’t want him carrying her all the way back to Thea’s house, anyway. So he prods her shoulder a bit and she scrunches her face up, then opens her eyes.  
  
“Oh,” she mumbles. “I must’ve drifted off. Forgive me, uh…” she trails off. Then she remembers she’s not in Ylisstol, and her manner shifts. “Oh, it’s you.”  
  
“No need for the fanfare,” Phila teases. Emm narrows her eyes, but it’s definitely not a glare. She sits up, tossing her hair out of her face and smoothing out her skirt. She looks around, blinking in the growing evening sunlight.  
  
“Where’s Charlotte?” she asks. “Shouldn’t she have returned by now?”  
  
“I thought—“ Phila cuts herself off. She looks at Phobos. “Did you see her?”  
  
“I would’ve noticed,” Phobos replies. “Uh—“  
  
“Oh, wonderful,” Frederick mutters. “My first year as a bodyguard and one of the royal family is already missing. This is certain to do me nothing but good on my resume.”  
  
“You’re really thinking about your _resume?”_ Emm demands. “My sister is _missing_ , and all _you_ can think about is your job? What kind of bodyguard are you?”  
  
“Lay off him,” Phila says, trying to mediate.  
  
“No!” Emm snaps. “This is _your_ fault! If Charlotte hadn’t gotten it into her head to have an adventure— look for— for fae and witches and other ridiculous things— th-then maybe— maybe—“ She bites at her lip, blinking back tears that come anyway.  
  
Phila deflates. Phobos puts a hand on her shoulder.  
  
“Let’s borrow a couple of pegasi from home and split up to look,” he suggests. “She can’t have gotten far. I’ll check in town and you check the woods.”  
  
“Alright,” Phila says. “The two of you should wait at home.”  
  
“Absolutely not,” Emmeryn says firmly, straightening her back. “I’m coming along, too, and that is final.”  
  
Phobos sighs. “Alright, you can come with me,” he says. “Timbre is bigger and can carry two anyway, so Phila can take Forte. Frederick can wait at home in case she finds her way there.”  
  
Frederick salutes. “I will stand guard at the house,” he promises. “Your Grace, where is your sister most likely to go?”  
  
“I don’t know, I don’t—“ Emmeryn cuts herself off, growling in frustration. “The woods? Or she’s found a friend somewhere and lost track of time? Charlotte is always looking for new playmates for her hero games.”  
  
“Then Phila can scan the woods,” Phobos decides. “We’ll find her, your Grace. Don’t you worry a bit.”

* * *

It’s not very long before Charlie starts to think they’ve been walking in circles. All the trees begin to look vaguely familiar, even if they all look like trees still and Charlie is not particularly observant even for a five-year-old, and it’s getting dark anyway so it’s not like Charlie can tell. Maybe they’ve been going in circles, or maybe they haven’t. Whether they have or have not been walking in circles, Charlie’s feet are getting tired.  
  
She stops. The shadows feel cold, like they’re creeping up her back. Her shoes are pinching her toes and even if her dress isn’t scratchy and heavy like the ones she wears in Ylisstol, sweat still prickles on the back of her neck and makes her arms feel itchy. She scratches at mosquito bites on her arm and at the heat pinpricks even though she knows they’ll come back.  
  
“Ser Pounce,” she says to Ser Pounce. “I know you’re shy, but can you grow into big size and carry us through the forest? I’m tired.”  
  
Ser Pounce doesn’t reply.  
  
Several steps ahead, the boys turn. Sully tucks his hands behind his neck and sighs. “If your lion’s not gonna help us, then he’s not gonna help us,” he says. “I know the berry bushes were somewhere around here. We’ll find ‘em quick and then get back home.”  
  
“It’s getting late, though,” Stahl admits, glancing up at the darkening sky. “Maybe we just need to ask more nicely?”  
  
“Ser Pounce will give us a ride,” Charlie insists. “He just is shy around new people. Also if they’re mean to me for no reason. He doesn’t like that.” She shoots a meaningful glance at Sully.  
  
Sully rolls his eyes. “I wasn’t mean to you none,” he argues.  
  
“Were too!” Charlie shoots back. “You said I was a baby an’ a chicken an’ a coward an’ I’m none of those things!”  
  
“Well only _babies_ make a big deal outta somethin’ that doesn’t even really matter!” Sully replies. “‘Cause right now we’re lost in the middle of the woods an’ all you can worry about is gettin’ worked up over stupid stuff!”  
  
“ _You’re_ stupid!” Charlie shrieks. “I didn’t even wanna come with you dumb heads anyway! I’m goin’ back to my sister! Come on, Ser Pounce!”  
  
She holds Ser Pounce tighter and marches back the way they came, feet stomping purposefully on the carpet of leaves and pine needles— leaving Stahl and Sully to watch her go.  
  
“Stupids,” Charlie mutters, rubbing her eyes with her forearm. She hadn’t even realized she was crying until now. Maybe she really is a baby— only babies cry when they’re by themselves in big dark forests. She swallows, trying to blink her tears back, and doesn’t succeed. She sniffles.  
  
Ser Pounce hops out of her hands and pulls himself into his bigger size, silver-colored armor and green livery shining even in the low light. Charlie sniffles again, biting her lip hard enough it hurts.  
  
_“'Oh, Charlie,'” he sighs, lowering himself so she can climb on. “'I’m sorry I couldn’t help you.'”_  
  
“N-no,” Charlie hiccups. “S-s’okay. I know— _hic_ — you don’t like dew people.” But she climbs on anyway, her magnificent green cape with Ylisse’s wings in glittering white on the back. Ser Pounce trots through the forest, massive paws stepping over fallen trees and unruly shrubs.  
  
“Let’s go back to Ser Gale’s house,” Ser Pounce suggests. “Everyone must be worried by now.”  
  
“I guess,” Charlie admits. “Bet Emm didn’t even think I was gonna go on a real adventure. She’s gonna be mad when I get back ‘cause I wandered too far an’ made her stop her reading. S’all she cares about anyway. She’s no fun.”  
  
Ser Pounce grunts in agreement. Charlie keeps talking, more to herself than Ser Pounce. She takes out her sandwich and idly nibbles at it, pulling out the sliced tomato and lettuce with her teeth and chomping it down first. She watches the crows gather in the shadowy branches, and tears off bits of bread to scatter on the ground for them. She doesn’t like the bread that Thea makes sandwiches with, anyway— she doesn’t like bread with seeds, it’s weird.  
  
“Guess bein’ Exalt means you can’t be fun,” Charlie admits. “Sounds dumb. How come papa an’ mama had to get dead, huh? Just ‘cause they did means Emm has to do papa’s job an’ she can’t play with me anymore. I bet if papa an’ mama were still alive, Emmy would’ve come with us an’ she could’ve set Sully straight when he said I was a baby an’ a coward. She could’ve found the dumb bushes no problem, an’ then we all wouldn’t have gotten lost.”  
  
The crows squawk and peck at the chunks of bread Charlie had scattered as Ser Pounce takes her through the forest. _Hi, crows,_ Charlie thinks, giving a little wave. Phobos had said it was always best to be nice to the crows, because they never forget a face and you never knew how many might be witches in disguise.  
  
A horrible thought occurs to her. “Ser Pounce!” she yelps, swallowing her last bits of sandwich. “Phila an’ Phobos said this forest was dangerous an’ it had witches! I asked ‘em to please not kidnap me so I’m fine, but Sully an' Stahl aren't! What if they went an’ got hurt or transformed?”  
  
_“'But they were mean to you,'” Ser Pounce says. “'We should go home first.'”_  
  
“That’s coward talk!” Charlie retorts, grabbing Ser Pounce’s mane and turning him around. “Come on, Ser Pounce! A hero wouldn’t leave anyone to die, no matter how mean they were! _Hyah!”_  
  
She spurs Ser Pounce into a run. Ser Pounce roars, bounding through the forest back towards the two Charlie had left behind.  
  
In the meantime, Sully and Stahl have found the berry bushes by the arch— though their berry bucket remains empty. In fact the bucket is on the ground, forgotten, and Sully and Stahl are face to face with a creature knit from shadows, howling as the wind picks up. Sully waves his walking stick menacingly and Stahl, a step back, loads his slingshot with shaking hands.  
  
“This is bad,” he whispers. “I’m running low on pebbles.”  
  
“Improvise,” Sully whispers back. “I’m not going down to this damned thing and neither are you, if I have to drag your dead body back by the ear! I’m a son of House Rhoddens of Ansburg and I won’t lose here!” With a mighty battle cry, he leaps again and smashes the shadow over the head with his stick. The shadow hisses, retreating into the darkness. The spirits of the woods, angry at the disturbance of their slumber, moan and whisper, rising like mist from the ground. Sully grips his stick tighter. He backs up, pressing his back to Stahl’s. Brothers-in-arms always fight back to back; at least that’s what he’s heard.  
  
“We can still run,” Stahl says, voice shaking. “Run’n get my ma— she’ll scare all these louts off!”  
  
“Wh-what if they follow?” Sully replies. “We can’t put your ma in harm’s way, too. She’s Ansburg’s last line of defense. ‘Sides, as men, we’ve gotta—“  
  
“Enough with the men stuff!” Stahl snaps. “There’s plenty manly about livin’ to fight another day!”  
  
“Well it wouldn’t be manly to die at the hands of somethin’ that don’t got thumbs,” Sully says stubbornly. “Watch my back! I’m goin in—“  
  
With a mighty roar, Ser Pounce bounds onto the scene. Charlie, her pointed crown glimmering as silver as her armor and her blade, glares fearlessly at the shadow as her blessed blade, Lightblade of Darkness-Slaying, slices through the shadow-creature. The dusklight and the breeze reflect off the green and white of her cape, and the wings of Ylisse’s crest almost leap off the cape itself. In that moment, Charlie is every bit the hero she dreams of being.  
  
“You two run away,” she calls back to Sully and Stahl, “I’ll handle this.”  
  
“Whoa,” Stahl breathes.  
  
“No way!” Sully insists, grinning. “It’s bad form to let a lady fight all on her lonesome! Come on, Stahl!”  
  
His courage increased, Stahl grins back. “Yeah,” he agrees. “Every hero-queen needs her loyal knights, right?”  
  
Charlie beams. Then she cracks her knuckles and lifts her sword again. “Alright, then, my knights,” she decides. “Ser Sully! Ser Stahl! _Attack!”_  
  
And with a mighty battle cry, the three charge into battle— armor glistening, weapons glowing, facing down the darkness with the power of light and hope itself.  
  
When they return to the bridge across the river, scuffed and scraped from the battle but no less courageous, the sky has turned the brilliant colors of sunset and the sun is sinking low on the western sky. Sully and Stahl swing the bucket of blueberries between them, satisfied by the spoil from defeating the shadow. Charlie smiles to herself, Ser Pounce once again a stuffed lion with a yarn mane and button eyes in her arms, with Lightblade in one of her small hands and courage in her eyes.  
  
“I’m glad you got your berries,” she says to Stahl and Sully.  
  
Sully grins proudly. “My ma’s gonna make the best cobbler,” he says. “An’ jam an’ pancakes an’ muffins! An’ we’ll definitely win the baking contest when fall comes ‘round. Just you watch!”  
  
“Whoa, cobbler!” Charlie says excitedly. “Cool! What’s cobbler?”  
  
“S’like pie but better,” Stahl sums up. “You should come an’ try some sometime! His house is real big, you can’t miss it. You can read, right? If you can there’s a sign that says Rhoddens out front. If you can’t, then it’s big an’ red.”  
  
“I can read,” Charlie promises. “I’ll ask my sister an’ I’ll come visit! An’ if there’s any more adventures you wanna go on, don’t hesitate to come ask me! I’m stayin’ with the Gales up in Enderwick.”  
  
“We’ll look for the lion,” Stahl says. The three of them laugh, because it’s funny, and because the victorious heroes always laugh after the adventure is over. “Don’t worry, Charlie. Now that you’ve got us as your knights, adventures are gonna be a whole lot funner!”  
  
“I hope so, ‘cause I get real bored when it’s just me an’ Ser Pounce,” Charlie replies.  
  
The beating of huge wings overhead interrupts the conversation. The three triumphant adventurers watch as a pegasus soars overhead, bound from Enderwick, and lands on the road in front of them. It’s tall and knobbly-kneed, with a rich brown coat and white patches on its legs and wings.  
  
Phila looks over the pegasus’s wing at Charlie, and hops off in one swift movement. “Charlie!” she says, clearly relieved. “Gods, where were you? We were all so worried!”  
  
“I had an adventure!” Charlie says excitedly. “I brought Ser Pounce an’ I found a sword called Lightblade of Darkness-Slaying an’ I met two friend-knights an’ I said hi to the crows an’ we found berries an’—“  
  
“Let’s go home first,” Phila says. “Come on. At this rate, both your sister and Freddy are gonna worry themselves into an early grave. And your friends—“  
  
“Horse!” Sully says excitedly. “Cool! What’s her name? Is she yours? You got your own pegasus all for yourself?”  
  
Phila squints at the two of them. “You’re the Rhoddens kid, right?” she says. “You’d best get home, too, unless you want your dad to come out looking for you.”  
  
Sully blanches. He’s not supposed to be out after sunset, either. “Uh,” he manages. “We’ll see you later, Charlie?” He grabs Stahl by the arm and starts hurrying back down the road, blueberries spilling out of the bucket with every step.  
  
“Yeah,” Charlie calls. “Bye-bye! Thank you for your bravery, loyal knights!”  
  
Stahl waves as they hurry down the road, spilling blueberries as they go. Eventually Sully tugs on his hand again, and the two break into a run.  
  
Phila crouches, pushing Charlie’s messy curls back from her face and examining her scratches. “You’re all scratched up,” she says. “What happened?”  
  
“I told you, I had an adventure,” Charlie insists. “It was amazing! Emmy’s gonna wanna hear about it too, an’ Phobos an’ Freddy an’ Ser Thea an’ it’s too bad baby Lissa can’t be here to hear it, but I guess I’ll just have to tell her when we get back to the city.” Even though baby Lissa is a baby and babies don’t really listen to anything you tell them because they only have very small ears.  
  
But that’s enough of that. Phila helps Charlie onto the pegasus (her name is Forte) and they fly home— and as many times as it takes, Charlie will repeat this day in her head, so she’ll never forget it.

* * *

  
  
Years in the future, Chrom recounts the day to his children— who had been listening in rapt attention, mostly because they don’t want to go to bed.  
  
“Of course, I don’t know if the shadow was real or not,” he says. Lucina, her knees pulled to her chest, inhales. She clutches her toy sword tightly, imagining what it’d be like to fight the spirits of the forest. Marcus imitates this, mouth wide open in awe.  
  
“It could’ve been,” Chrom continues, setting storybooks back on the shelf of the nursery. “Greenbark Forest is a magical place, you know. Full of witches and fae and yes— even ghosts. You never quite know what’s real when you enter, and when you exit— if you exit— you’ll never be the same.”  
  
“I’d exit,” Lucina says bravely. “What’s some dumb old forest ghost, anyway?”  
  
“Dumb ghost!” Marcus cheers.  
  
Chrom chuckles. “That’s very brave of you,” he says. Lucina puffs out her skinny chest proudly.  
  
“I’m not scared of nothin’,” she insists. “‘Specially not ghosts. An’ anyway, mama says that when a guy gets dead, he turns into dirt an’ feeds new plants. An’ mama’s real smart, so.”  
  
Chrom chuckles. “Indeed she is,” he says, mussing Lucina’s curls and Marcus’s in turn. Lucina is six and Marcus is two, and for a moment he wishes they could stay that size forever. But that’s merely the selfish and impossible wish of a father who wants to protect his children from harm. Still— is it so wrong to want such a thing?


End file.
